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Assistance Sought for Taliban Areas
Monday, October 15, 2001
(10:44 AM ET)
By Vivienne Walt / USA TODAY

What happens to the flour down the road is uncertain.

DOGHARUN, Iran -- USA TODAY
Scrambling to avert massive hunger and disease as winter's freezing temperatures descend on much of Afghanistan, U.N. officials will begin today to truck flour from the USA and Britain, as well as blankets and medicines, across this sealed frontier into Taliban-controlled areas. "If assistance does not continue, many of these people will not be able to survive. It could be a catastrophe," Ershad Karim, head of the United Nations Children's Fund office for western Afghanistan, said in Iran's capital Tehran.

Like all foreign aid workers, Karim was evacuated from Afghanistan after the attacks on Sept. 11 and is now trying to mount a huge relief operation from afar. "In normal times many of these people depend heavily on aid," he said.

Armed Taliban officials stand guard just a mile east of this border post, across an arid strip of desert the relief organizations call Zero Point. There was no sign of any Afghans fleeing toward Iran this weekend. But aid officials here fear that deeper inside Afghanistan, where foreign relief workers are forbidden to travel, hundreds of thousands of Afghans are dangerously short of food and water as winter approaches.
(More: USA TODAY News Source)
2001 © USA TODAY.

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