QUETTA (Reuters) - The U.N. refugee agency said on Monday it was making a ``substantial'' world appeal to help thousands of Afghan refugees heading for neighboring countries in fear of an impending U.S. strike. (Read photo caption below)
``We are launching our main appeal...it will be a very substantial appeal,'' a spokesman from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Rupert Colville, told reporters in Pakistan's southwestern city of Quetta.
He said UNHCR had a verbal agreement with the Pakistani government but was waiting for the green light from local authorities to set up a refugee camp near the border with Afghanistan in the province of Baluchistan.
Quetta is the capital of the province.
``The first tent may go up tomorrow,'' Colville said, adding the UNHCR hoped to start screening refugees at the border on Tuesday.
Colville said an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Afghans were massing on the other side of Pakistan's Chaman crossing. Islamabad last week closed its border with Afghanistan, only allowing food into the country and people with valid papers out.
He said there were rumors of some refugees stranded in Afghanistan dying from diarrhea
The United Nations and other aid agencies have said tens of thousands of Afghans are on the move inside the country, hoping to escape expected U.S. attacks.
Over two million Afghans already live as refugees in Pakistan and about 1.5 million in Iran, victims of nearly 30 years of conflict and a more recent drought.
Colville said Pakistani authorities had agreed to set up a camp at Dara, nearly six miles from the Chaman. Dara is an old refugee village from the 1980s when millions of Afghans left their homes to escape the guerrilla war against Soviet invasion.
Colville said Dara once housed about 20,000 people but was now virtually empty.
``This (refugee camp) would be the first move to give assistance to refugees from this developing emergency, anywhere in the region,'' he said.
PHOTO CAPTION:
An Afghan worker carries a sack of wheat at the United Nations World Food Program warehouse near Peshawar September 24, 2001. Aid groups, already struggling to feed displaced Afghans in Pakistan, are bracing for an onslaught of refugees in anticipation of a feared U.S. attack. (Zainal Abd Halim/Reuters)