Awareness Stream                                  

MIRAMSHAH: Two US drone strikes on Friday killed at least ten militants, including some foreign fighters, in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt near the Afghan border, security officials said.

Both strikes hit North Waziristan district, a renowned hub for Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants.

The first struck a militant compound on the outskirts of North Waziristan's main town of Miramshah.

It was followed within an hour by a second strike that targeted a car travelling in Datta Khel, a small town 30 kilometres from Miramshah, officials said.

“A US drone fired two missiles on a house used by militants as a compound. Six militants have been killed and three wounded in this attack,” a security official in Peshawar told AFP by telephone of the first strike.

Intelligence officials in Miramshah said all those killed in that strike were local militants. One official said the house was completely destroyed.

“All those killed were local militants. We have no report about the presence of any 'high-value' target,” the intelligence official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Soon after the attack, militants surrounded the house and began rescue work, residents in Miramshah said.

“They have recovered six dead bodies and three injured from the debris,” a local resident told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Four militants were killed in a car by the second strike, officials said. “US drones fired three missiles at the car, killing at least four militants inside the car,” a security official in Peshawar told AFP.

Officials said those killed in that strike were foreign militants whose nationalities were not yet known.

Two intelligence officials in Miramshah confirmed both the attacks and the death toll.

DERA ISMAIL KHAN: Pakistan's Taliban threatened on Friday to launch attacks in the United States and Europe “very soon”.

The warning came after a renewal of militant violence in Pakistan this week that is piling pressure on a US-backed government overwhelmed by the flood crisis.

“We will launch attacks in America and Europe very soon,” Qari Hussain Mehsud, a senior Pakistani Taliban leader and mentor of suicide bombers, told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.

QUETTA: At least 53 people were killed and 197 injured on Friday in a suicide bombing targeting a Shia Muslim rally in Quetta, the latest in a string of sectarian attacks.

“According to the reports collected from hospitals, 53 people have been kiled and 197 have been injured,” Sardar Khan, chief of Quetta's police control room told AFP by telephone.

Police said the bomber was among the 450-strong crowd and detonated on reaching the main square in the city, triggering chaotic scenes, with people setting fires as others fled or laying on the ground to avoid ongoing gunfire.

A doctor in Quetta's main hospital said the toll of wounded was higher, with more than 80 people receiving treatment for injuries sustained in the attack.

The rally was being held to mark Al-Quds day, an international event staged every year by the Shia community, opposing Israel's control of Jerusalem and showing solidarity with Palestinian Muslims.

Malik Iqbal, police chief for Baluchistan province, said rally organisers had been warned to use a different route in case of terror attacks.

Police were forced to quell unrest following the attack, said Khan.

“An angry mob tried to set on fire a private building and vehicles. Some of the participants were armed and they were firing in the air. They also set on fire some bicycles and motorcycles,” said Khan.

Local television channel Aaj said one of its drivers had been killed in the blast, while there were reports of several other journalists injured in the incident.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani strongly condemned the bomb blast and called for an immediate inquiry into the incident.

The US embassy also condemned the attack. It was the latest in a string of attacks as Muslims marked the final days of the holy month of Ramadan.—AFP

DERA ISMAIL KHAN: The Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed at least 50 Shia Muslims in Quetta on Friday.

The attack sharply drove up the toll of sectarian assaults in a country battered by massive flooding.

Taliban commander Qari Hussain Mehsud tells The Associated Press that though they are fighting the US and the Pakistani government, ''Shias are also our target.''—AP

PESHAWAR: At least one man was killed and four wounded Friday when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside an Ahmadi place of worship in Mardan, police said.

“A suicide bomber was trying to enter the Ahmadis’ worship place, but he was intercepted by the guards outside and blew himself up,” Mardan police chief Waqif Khan told AFP.

“A passerby was killed and four others were wounded in the firing and suicide attack,” Khan said, adding that it was unclear whether the man was killed by the bomb or by gunshots fired by the guards.

Police have handed over the bomber’s body parts to a forensic team, he said.

In May nearly 100 people were killed in the eastern city of Lahore after militants stormed two Ahmadi prayer halls launching gun and grenade attacks.

Gunmen later raided the hospital where victims were being treated, killing four people in a shoot out.

THATTA: Angry outbursts by flood victims reliant on scarce aid are hampering relief work in Pakistan, the Red Cross said, as the nation struggles to cope with its worst-ever natural disaster.

A month after monsoons triggered catastrophic flooding throughout the country, submerging an area the size of England, eight million remain dependent on handouts for their survival, which they say are too slow coming.

Aid workers say they have fled outbreaks of violence among the frustrated survivors living in makeshift camps, while there have been isolated, spontaneous protests that have occasionally forced road closures.

Jacques de Maio, the head of operations for South Asia for ICRC, said it had to halt two distributions recently due to unrest.

“What we are detecting is a very worrying trend of areas where... people are so in need, so resentful of not getting enough aid, that they turn understandably aggressive and this is bad because it doesn’t help in our efforts to reach more of them,” he said in Geneva Thursday.

Aid worker Aslam Khwaja, working for Pakistan charity the Edhi Foundation, said he had witnessed three violent outbreaks in the past few days in southern Thatta city, in the worst-hit Sindh province.

“People have been getting violent because there’s no coordination among the various aid agencies and the government, which causes delays in providing relief goods and makes people angry,” he told AFP.

While the international community has donated 700 million dollars, domestic anger has been mounting against the widely unpopular civilian government, which has come under fire for its handling of the crisis.

The UN has warned that the slow pace of aid pledges could impede relief operations and says Pakistan faces a triple threat to food supplies — with seeds, crops and incomes hit.

“Given the number of those in need, this is a humanitarian operation of unprecedented scale,” Manuel Bessler, head of the UN’s coordination agency OCHA, said in a statement.

The floods have ruined 3.6 million hectares of rich farmland, and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said farmers urgently needed seeds to plant for next year’s crops.

In southern Pakistan, hundreds of hungry and desperate families from a relief camp in Thatta blocked the highway to Karachi one morning this week, demanding the government provide more food and shelter.

“No food or water has been provided to us for the past two days,” Mohammad Qasim, a 60-year-old resident of the flooded town of Sujawal, told AFP.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said Wednesday the flooding had caused economic losses of 43 billion dollars.

The World Bank on Thursday raised flood aid to Pakistan to one billion dollars, while the IMF approved 450 million dollars in emergency financing to help the nation cope.

The Organisation of the Islamic Conference on Thursday appealed to Muslims everywhere to direct their zakat tithes — donations required under Islam — to relief for Pakistan, rather than leave Pakistanis “alone to their fate”.

With the deluge flowing south, Sindh irrigation minister Jam Saifullah Dharejo said Friday that the last two towns lying between the flood and the Arabian Sea had now been completely evacuated.

But he said a breach in a canal had caused new flooding further north in Sindh.

“Around eight million people have been affected by the flood in Sindh and 2.5 million of them were displaced,” Dharejo said.

The government’s official death toll from the floods has reached 1,760, but disaster officials have said that number will likely rise “significantly” when the missing are accounted for. —AFP

BHAKKAR: A month ago, Pakistan's Indus river swelled and burst its banks, swallowing up fisherman Ghulam Shabir's village of 20 mud-brick homes and sending the 200 people living there fleeing for higher ground.

Today, Shabir is furious: he says it has been 10 days since the river retreated from the land but no one from the army or the Pakistani government has come to help him.

“At this point, we need tents, because in case of rain, there can be shelter for our children,” he said as his wife and children sought relief from the mid-day sun.

“We need something to make shelters, but I don't think the government will provide anything. ... We were starving, but they didn't show up.”

He has received only a single tent from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and food and medicine from Islamic charity Falah-e-Insaniyat (FeI), he said.

Falah-e-Insaniyat is believed to have ties to Jamaat-ud-Dawa charity, which the UN Security Council banned last December for its alleged links with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group blamed for the 2008 attack on the Indian city of Mumbai.

Shabir has to trek 13 km (8 miles) to the FeI distribution centre every day for food aid. “I didn't receive anything from the government,” he says.

The story is the same further down the river. From a creaky fishing boat, villages on both sides of the river are simply gone, sometimes replaced with ragged tent cities made of homemade canvas, carpets and blankets strung up on tree limbs.

Millions of flood victims are still homeless in Pakistan and potentially fatal diseases threaten to bring a new wave of death.

Zafar Iqbal, who manages relief activity in the four districts of southern Punjab for Falah-e-Insaniyat, said that 180 mobile medical camps had been set up, serving 72,000 patients. More than 120,000 people had received hot meals.

He said the aid comes from private donations from Pakistanis. The district government is also routing some aid through the group, because it has an established relief network.

The United States and Pakistani officials have warned that militant groups and their charitable wings could use the flood crisis to undermine faith in the government and attract recruits.

“If serving humanity and providing food to poor and deserving people is terrorism then we're terrorists,” said Rehan Butt, spokesman for Falah-e-Insaniyat. – Reuters

PESHAWAR: Police say a roadside bomb near a police van killed a police officer and wounded three others.

Police official Shafiullah Khan said the bomb was detonated by remote control Friday as officers patrolled on Ring Road in Peshawar's Achini Bala area on Friday, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where floods have affected millions of people in recent weeks. – AP

DERA ISMAIL KHAN: Pakistan's Taliban on Friday took responsibility for triple bombings at a Shia Muslim procession in the city of Lahore that killed 33 people.

Wednesday's blasts in the eastern city was the first major militant attack in Pakistan since floods waters tore through the country over the past month.

“It's revenge for the killings of innocent Sunnis,” a spokesman for Qari Hussain Mehsud, mentor of the Taliban's suicide bombers, told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.

“We also have videos of the fidayeen (bombers) and we may release them,” the spokesman Shakirullah Mehsud told Reuters.

Hussain is a senior leader of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Taliban Movement of Pakistan led by Hakimullah Mehsud, who was charged by US prosecutors this week in the plot that killed seven CIA employees at an American base in Afghanistan last December.

The United States on Wednesday included TTP in its list of foreign terrorist organisations and announced a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to his arrest and another TTP leader, Wali-ur-Rehman.

Commonly known as “Ustad-e-Fidayeen” or “the mentor of suicide bombers,” Hussain began his militant career with an anti-Shia group before joining TTP, the main Taliban grouping in Pakistan which is fighting Pakistani government forces and is also increasingly seen as direct threat to the United States.

The attack in Lahore came as the government is struggling to cope with country's worst floods with millions of people threatened by malnutrition and diseases.

The floods struck just as the army said it had made progress in the war against the TTP militants. – Reuters

KARACHI: The massive floods that began to hit Pakistan in late July have afflicted the country extremely. Seventy-nine of the country’s124 districts (24 in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa, 19 in Sindh, 12 in Punjab, 10 in Balochistan and seven each in Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan) have been affected. Official estimates say 1,600 people have been killed and more than 17 million are affected by the catastrophe. The disaster has not only led to losses in terms of human casualties and large scale displacement but has also damaged the agricultural country’s major crops over an estimated area of more than 1.38 million acres which constitutes 30 per cent of Pakistan’s agricultural land.

Wheat, Pakistan's most important produce, has been severely damaged in the floods. Data from the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock reveals that 44,896 tonnes of wheat in Punjab and 80,823 tonnes in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa have been totally spoilt. Moreover, in Sindh, some 5,41,696 tonnes of wheat are estimated to have been destroyed, whereas, in Balochistan, the overall damage to crops has occurred over an area of 321,651 acres.

However, government and agriculture circles are now considering the possibility that seeds planted after the floodwaters recede, may lead to a bumper harvest in the following sowing seasons in flood-affected regions. 

Dr Abdul Rashid, Member Monitoring and Evaluation, Punjab Agricultural Research Board, explains: Flood-affected fields will receive a layer of fertile soil from the floodwaters…these waters, coming from high hills, bring with them leaves of trees and remains of wild grass which are rich in organic matter. When this water reaches the plains, its speed slows down and rich soil particles start to settle in, leaving a good layer of fertile soil.

“This fertile layer will result in good yields in the coming years,” Dr Rashid told Dawn.com. 

According to former Federal Minister for Food, Agriculture and Livestock Khair Muhammad Junejo, before the development of irrigation systems and barrages, it was the floods which nourished farmlands. Junejo, who has farmland in Sindh’s Sanghar district, said the floods’ “overall effect for land will be beneficial.”

Crops can be planted once the waters recede but while the upcoming wheat-planting season of Rabi is feared to be at risk in some farming regions, Dr Rashid says eventually “the floods will recharge the water in the soil and underground water resources will increase”.

“This underground water will also be of better quality (due to recharging of good water) and will be beneficial for future farming,” he said. 

In the case of salt-affected areas, standing water will “help in improving soil health by leaching down soluble salts to layers beneath the crop root zone”, Dr Rashid said, adding that this improvement in soil health will result in better crop production.   
 
However, Dr Shamsuddin Tunio, professor at the Faculty of Crop Production at the Sindh Agriculture University, Tandojam, is of the opinion that although “plain lands may benefit in terms of fertility…the floods erode away rich layers of soil and if water stands for a long time in the land, the next season’s crop may not be grown”.  

The problem of soil erosion is particularly visible in the Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province where hundreds of acres of agricultural lands have been washed away, destroying the region’s rice, sugarcane and maize plantations. Rendering the farmlands “almost uncultivable,” the condition is likely to lead to even more difficulties for the farmers.

Water logging  

Erosion and submerged conditions may also disturb the farmlands’ fertility leading to water logged soils, which will then need proper rehabilitation, Dr Tunio told Dawn.com.

“The dual problems of water logging and salinity which had already been affecting crop yields in parts of Sindh will only get worse with the current floods,” he said. 

Dr Rashid, concurring with the assessment, noted that water logged farmlands may encounter difficulty. These patches are present in “a few areas in Sindh...but other than that, there is little or no water logging.” 

The problem is likely to affect the process of cultivation this year, as “water has not yet receded from Sindh’s affected districts”.

“Forty per cent of Sindh is still submerged…the districts of Shikarpur, Jacobabad, Dadu, Kashmore, Larkana and Shahdadkot have been badly affected and chances are that the Rabi crops will not be planted this year,” Secretary Agriculture Sindh Agha Jan Akhtar said.

Fears and incentives 

Deen Mohammad, a displaced farmer from Shikarpur district and a father of six young children, says so far the government has not approached him regarding his work as a small farmer. 

Mohammad, who currently resides in a relief camp on the outskirts of Karachi, is reluctant to return to his village and fears that he might not receive enough assistance “to be able to make ends meet” if and when he does go back.

But while the assistance to farmers has been seemingly delayed, the government, currently more tied to providing immediate relief to displaced survivors, is also “discussing incentives for farmers”. 

“We are discussing incentives and measures such as provision of seeds for free or on subsidised rates…we do have the scale of destruction in mind and we are doing as much as we can to contain it and hopefully turn it around,” Akhtar told Dawn.com. 
 
Moreover, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) recently announced that it has completed the procurement of seeds for the upcoming Rabi season.

The seeds are to be distributed to 200,000 farming families. However, the damage caused by the disaster is likely to require a much more concerted effort on part of the authorities since farmers are likely to face a severe crisis of infrastructure and farm system management in the coming months. 

“This will require huge funds…proper financial support and credit to manage farm systems and facilities, including land damage,” Dr Tunio said. 

After having fulfilled the basic needs of “shelter, food, clean drinking water and health supplies, the government should make available to farmers a free Agri-package including seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, small tools and instruments”, he said, adding that “Agri-credit for rehabilitation of farm facilities should also be provided for the flood-hit farmers’ subsistence”.

The writer can be contacted at quratulain.siddiqui@gmail.com

NOWSHERA: When water gushed through Nowshera hospital last month it filled operating rooms and wards, left them clogged with stinking mud and forced patients to leave, whatever their condition.

Two doctors evacuating the sick had to be airlifted to safety after getting trapped on the top floor of the district hospital, the main source of health care for 1.6 million people in Pakistan's impoverished northwest.

“Eighty per cent of the hospital staff were affected themselves. The water had destroyed their homes, cars and everything. No one was able to come to hospital,” said the hospital's chief doctor, Muhammad Arshad.

But since the ruin, caused by monsoon-triggered floods which swept across the country, a massive volunteer undertaking has allowed the hospital to reopen, and Arshad now sits smiling on donated furniture in his freshly whitewashed office.

The walls that were blackened and buried in mud for a week are now a hygienic white, there are working heart-monitor, X-ray, ultrasound and anesthaesia machines, and the damaged water pipe has been replaced.

“When we arrived to rehabilitate the hospital we had no idea where to start, because every corner of the hospital needed immediate attention,” said Arif Mehmood Siddiqui, the administrative head of Pakistan's National University of Science and Technology, who coordinated the volunteer effort.

“What we had was mud and a stinking smell. There was not even a bench to sit on to run a clinic,” he says.

Young doctors from Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, arrived with doctors from international aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres, army engineers and university staff, to roll up their shirt sleeves and save the hospital.

Now, after hard work and donations, the hospital has new mattresses and pillows for all 114 beds, there are new delivery tables for the labour ward and the operating theatres are fully functioning.

“We have rediscovered this hospital from the rubble,” Siddiqui said.

Once the hospital itself had been saved, however, there were hundreds of flood victims waiting for help - meaning extra doctors were quickly needed.

“We ran this hospital for two weeks because the doctors normally on duty were affected themselves. There was a dire need for doctors and medicine and we successfully managed it,” said Rawalpindi doctor Nasir Habib.

The World Health Organization estimates that 4.4 million flood victims have received medical treatment since the floods began in late July, but that number only accounts for those who visited health centres that reported their figures.

Before the floods, this district hospital, situated close to Pakistan's militant-riddled tribal areas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, handled up to 400 patients each day, but Arshad says nearly 700 now come daily.

Many of them are suffering from water-borne gastric diseases caused by the month-long floods, which threaten to cause a second wave of death among the 18 million affected nationwide.

“Everything is under control, we are ready to fight diarrhoea and can deal with the patient load,” said doctor Fayaz Ahmed, who runs a clinic to counter the diarrhoea epidemic.

For Nabila, whose two-month-old daughter was struck with the illness, the work of the volunteers has saved her family.

“These doctors have given new life to my daughter. I am so thankful to this hospital which has saved my baby from death,” Nabila said.

For Shumaila Khatun, a 29-year-old woman who is due to give birth next month, the reopening of the hospital has brought much-needed relief.

“I am really relieved. Now I can give birth to my baby without worry,” she said. – AFP

ISLAMABAD: The United States has apologised to Pakistan over “mistreatment” of a Pakistani military delegation at a US airport this week, the Pakistani defence ministry said Friday.

US undersecretary of state for defence Michelle Flournoy apologised during a telephone call to Pakistan's top defence ministry official, Syed Athar Ali, the ministry said in a statement.

Flournoy “apologised for the mistreatment meted out to Pakistan's military delegation at the Dulles airport, Washington”, the statement said.

Pakistan had ordered the delegation to return from Washington to protest “unwarranted” airport security checks imposed after the delegation was invited to a meeting at the US military Central Command.

“Syed Athar Ali expressed serious concern over the incident and emphasised the need for an institutionalised mechanism where such like incidents are averted,” the statement said.

“Ms. Flournoy assured secretary defence that all necessary measures will be institutionalised after mutual consultations to avoid recurrence of any untoward incident in future.”

The nine members of the delegation were about to fly to Tampa, Florida from Dulles when they were pulled off the plane and questioned for over two hours.

The United Airlines flight crew had become concerned over a remark by one of the officers, a Pakistani official told AFP on Wednesday.

The Pakistanis showed security authorities their passports and letters of invitation to the conference at Central Command, but by the time they were released they had missed their flight, the official said.

Washington sees Pakistan as integral to winning the war in Afghanistan, as Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents targeting coalition forces roam the mountainous region dividing the two countries.

Pakistan receives more than one billion dollars a year from Washington for its help in fighting the Islamist militants. -AFP

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Thursday approved four Eid-ul-Fitr holidays from September 10 to 13.

He has urged the nation not to forget their brothers and sisters affected by the devastating floods on this sacred occasion.

All government institutions will remain close from Friday to Monday next week.—APP

RAWALPINDI: Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani on Thursday took an aerial view of the flood affected areas of Southern Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan.

Accompanied by Admiral Michael Mullen, Kayani stopped over at Multan, where he was briefed about the progress of relief operation conducted by the Army.

The COAS appreciated the sustained efforts being made to provide rescue and relief support to the affected people and directed the formations to also focus on the rehabilitation.—APP

LAHORE: After an attack on a religious procession in Lahore, Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah on Thursday once again blamed the federal government for non-cooperation in fight against terrorism.

Sanaullah, while talking to DawnNews, said that Interior Minister Rehman Malik’s help against terror attacks was only restricted to writing warning letters.

He claimed that people involved in terror activities in Punjab were coming from Waziristan.

The provincial law minister said that joint investigation committee had been formed to investigate the Karbala Gamay Shah attack.

KARACHI: Three people were killed in firing incidents in different areas of Karachi on Thursday.

Unknown assailants stormed a dispensary in the area of Pirabad of Banaras Chok and killed Danish Ali. The assailants fled while firing aerial gun shots.

In Malir, gunmen shot dead a laborer in the Khokharapar area. Situation became critical in Malir and Saudabad after the killing.

In another incident, a man was gunned down in 13-D of Gulshan-e-Iqbal. There were also reports of people getting injured because of firing in other areas of the city.—DawnNews

WASHINGTON: The World Bank on Thursday raised flood aid to Pakistan to one billion dollars while the IMF approved 450 million dollars in emergency financing to help the nation cope with its worst-ever humanitarian disaster.

The World Bank would “raise its flood-related support in the current fiscal year to one billion dollars from 900 million dollars,” the bank's president Robert Zoellick told Pakistan Finance Minister Hafeez Shaikh, a statement said.

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn announced separately that the fund “will provide around 450 million dollars in immediate emergency financing” to Pakistan to help it manage the aftermath of the massive and devastating floods.

The unprecedented floods have engulfed an area the size of England, affecting more than 18 million people, including eight million who are dependent on aid handouts to survive.

The scale of the disaster is so large that a month after the deluge, many are complaining of going without food or water for days.—AFP

GENEVA: Growing resentment among Pakistan flood victims on the pace of aid delivery is hampering the relief effort, the international Red Cross warned Thursday, saying it had to halt two distributions recently due to unrest.

“What we are detecting is a very worrying trend of areas where ... people are so in need, so resentful of not getting enough aid, that they turn understandably aggressive and this is bad because it doesn't help in our efforts to reach more of them,” said Jacques de Maio, the head of operations for South Asia for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

He pointed out that in two instances in the past eight days, officials had to stop distribution of relief items “because of unrest.”

”We are worried because if this trend extends, propagates,” it could hinder the aid effort, he noted.

De Maio noted that the trend is particularly worrying because, unlike other disasters such as an earthquake, the floods are generating more and more victims as the high waters sweep into new regions.

“The thing is that due to the sheer magnitude of this and the fact that we are not in for a sprint, we're here for a marathon, we need to make sure that (such unrest) does not become the rule rather than the exception,” he said.

De Maio also pointed out that certain elements were also not helping by agitating the crowd.

“If you organise a distribution for 30,000 and in the last 48 hours you have an additional 150,000, then you have a problem, particularly if you have people in the crowd, behind the crowd saying that 'anyway they're useless, anyway they are politicised',” he said.

“By doing so, the choice is the usual dilemma, are we ready to have our friends, our staff being killed and looted there? Because instead of helping 150,000 people we can only help 30,000?”

”Our angle is that we want first to help this 30,000 and see how we can extend what we do,” said de Maio.

The unprecedented floods have engulfed an area the size of England, affecting more than 18 million people, including eight million who are dependent on aid handouts to survive.

The scale of the disaster is so large that a month after the deluge, many are complaining of going without food or water for days.

The ICRC, which has already reached hundreds of thousands of flood victims, expects to reach around 1.4 million people within the next six weeks.—Agencies

KARACHI: Another batch of 100 Indian fishermen was released on Thursday by Malir jail authorities.

According to jail officials, the fishermen were released in the morning to facilitate their travel to Wagah border where they will be handed over to Indian officials.

The fishermen were arrested for violating Pakistani territorial waters.

The government has ordered the release of 442 Indian fishermen as a gesture of goodwill. First batch of 100 fishermen was released on August 30 from Malir jail.

The remaining fishermen will depart for India on September 4 and 6 respectively. — APP

THATTA: Relief efforts in flood-ravaged Pakistan are being stretched by the “unprecedented scale” of the disaster, with the flow of international aid almost at a standstill, the UN said Thursday.

A month of catastrophic flooding has now killed 1,760 people and affected more than 18 million, including eight million who are dependent on aid handouts to survive, it said.

Although the initially slow pace of aid had improved since a visit by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in mid-August, the UN said it has “almost stalled” since the beginning of last week, rising from 274 million dollars to 291 million dollars - about two thirds of funding needs.

“Given the number of those in need, this is a humanitarian operation of unprecedented scale,” Manuel Bessler, head of the UN's coordination agency OCHA said in a statement.

“We need to reach at least eight million people, from the Karakoram Mountain Range in the north to the Arabian Sea in the south.”

Thousands of people were trapped by floodwaters in towns in the southern province of Sindh, while others are complaining of going without food or water for days, some forced to live in the rubble of their ruined homes.

The World Bank raised its emergency funding for Pakistan to one billion dollars amid dire warnings about the threat to the country's food supplies.

The floods have ruined 3.6 million hectares (8.9 million acres) of rich farmland and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said farmers urgently needed seeds to plant for next year's crops.

“Unless people get seeds over the next few weeks they will not be able to plant wheat for a year,” Daniele Donati, director for FAO emergency operations in Asia, the Middle East and Europe, said on Wednesday.

“Food aid alone will not be enough. If the next wheat crop is not salvaged, the food security of millions will be at risk,” Donati warned.

The World Food Programme has warned that Pakistan faces a triple threat to food supplies - with seeds, crops and incomes hit.

In southern Pakistan, hundreds of hungry and desperate families from a relief camp in the city of Thatta blocked the highway to Karachi for three hours Wednesday, demanding the government provide more food and shelter.

“No food or water has been provided to us for the past two days,” Mohammad Qasim, a 60-year-old resident of the flooded town of Sujawal, told AFP.

The protest came as under-fire Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani warned the country faced inflation of up to 20 per cent and slower economic growth because of the floods, warning of job losses and social unrest.

Gilani said an inflation target of 9.5 per cent for 2011 would now likely be in the range of 15-20 per cent, spurred by food shortages, while GDP growth would also slide to 2.5 per cent from the predicted 4.5 per cent.

World Bank chief Robert Zoellick announced an extra 100 million dollars to add to an existing 900 million dollar loan as he met Pakistan's Finance Minister Hafeez Shaikh in Washington on Wednesday.

Zoellick said he and Shaikh discussed plans for institutional and governance reforms in Pakistan in the wake of the disaster.

The World Bank pledged to help Pakistan set up systems for tracking aid flows, and monitoring and evaluating the whole process to tackle waste and corruption.

Floodwaters moving south through Sindh province on their way to the Arabian Sea entered the town of Jati and threatened nearby Choohar Jamoli town on the east bank of the swollen Indus.

Several thousand people were trapped in the two towns, city official Hadi Bakhsh Kalhoro told AFP, and power cuts were hindering rescue efforts.

Most of the 300,000 population of Thatta have returned home, according to officials, after troops saved the city by fixing a breach in river defences.

Sindh is the worst-hit province, with 19 of its 23 districts ravaged as floodwaters have swollen the Indus to 40 times its usual volume.

One million people have been displaced over the past few days alone.

Initial relief efforts are still underway in the country's militant-troubled northwest, nearly two weeks after torrential rains stopped in the region.

The head of the UN refugee agency in Peshawar, the main city in the northwest, said shelter would be provided by next week for 80,000 people cut off from their villages by flooded roads and damaged bridges.

Khalid bin Waleed, a resident of Charsadda, said most of the 350 homes in the village had been destroyed and no government help was forthcoming.

“Now people are living on the rubble of their houses and those better off are camping on their roofs,” Waleed said.

“We have not received any help from the government yet. Only charities are helping people in our area and they are doing a really good job.” – AFP