Aid reached parts of Iraq today, but aid agencies warned US and British forces must ensure security to allow emergency water, food and medical supplies to reach into the heart of the country.
United Nations convoys have started to fan out in southern areas near the border with Kuwait and in Kurdish-controlled regions in the north of the country, officials said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is also providing medical help for war wounded and water supplies inside the capital, Baghdad, as well as around the southern city of Basra and from Erbil in northern Iraq.
A World Health Organisation (WHO) truck carrying 13 tonnes of medical supplies from Jordan arrived in Baghdad late on Wednesday for the first time since the conflict started, a spokeswoman for the UN's humanitarian coordination office (OCHA said.
However, areas around the route of the coalition forces' offensive on the Iraqi capital, including the south-central cities of Najaf, Nasiriyah and Karbala were still not being reached, according to the ICRC.
"It remains a very high priority for us to go back to towns like Najaf, Nasiriyah, Hilla, Karbala," an ICRC spokeswoman Ms Antonella Notari said. "We know that there are important emergency needs in hospitals and for water and sanitation there."
Ms Notari said the security vacuum after the collapse of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's regime needed to be filled rapidly, and warned that looting was also affecting some aid. Security conditions ranged from uncertainty in Basra to chaos in parts of Baghdad, because of both pockets of fighting and looting, according to the ICRC. "The biggest problem in Basra really is that we had managed to get water supply up again to 90 per cent for about 1.8 million people, and then the looters ransacked the water pipes," Ms Notari said.
The UN said that about US$720 million dollars worth of emergency supplies were heading towards Iraq by boat and by road, with some of its entering the south and north of the country.
About 55 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have told the UN they are ready to work in Iraq, while offers of governement aid have flowed in from several countries including the European Commission, Denmark, Germany, Egypt, Greece and the Phillipines. Several NGO aid groups asked the UN Security Council yesterday to assure them free access to Iraqis in need of humanitarian assistance.
AFP