The UN special representative in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, appealed Monday to leaders of a Taliban-led insurgency to allow aid workers to distribute food aid ahead of winter. Eide said the militants' agreement to allow medical teams to reach children in a polio immunisation drive last month should be the basis for other humanitarian action.
"We will be in the process over the coming weeks and months to ensure that food is available across the country to those who need it most," the Norwegian diplomat told reporters. "I would take this opportunity to appeal to the Taliban and to appeal to its leaders to ensure access for the distributors and to expand the humanitarian agenda that we should share," he said.
Eide said such efforts did not have political objectives and were not linked to military ambitions to "win hearts and minds" by distributing aid. "It is a purely neutral humanitarian effort," he said.
There have been more than 120 attacks on humanitarian and development programmes in 2008, according to a report to the UN Security Council last month. Thirty aid workers have been killed while 92 were abducted, it said.
Several UN World Food Programme aid convoys have also been attacked and torched.
About five million Afghans face food shortages with winter looming, British charity Oxfam has said. The Taliban-led insurgency, launched after the extremists were ejected from government in a US-led campaign in 2001, has made gains in recent years, with the militants holding sway in many remote areas in the south and east.
The group's leadership issued orders last month that polio vaccinators operating in these areas should be given safe access during a three-day immunisation drive. The campaign was nonetheless unable to reach 200,000 of its targeted 1.8 million children because of security fears.
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