Indonesia offers plane for Afghan airlift

Indonesia offers plane for Afghan airlift

KABUL (Reuter): The International Red Cross said yesterday it hoped to start an airlift of desperately needed medical supplies into the embattled Afghan capital Kabul next week using a plane offered by Indonesia.

"It's a real emergency," Peter Stocker, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation to Afghanistan, told Reuters.

"Providing adequate medical assistance to war wounded requires stocks of about 180 items, but we are now missing about 30 items, severely reducing our ability to save lives and limbs."

He said the Indonesian government had offered a Hercules C-130 cargo plane, with a capacity of about 20 tons, which was expected to arrive in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar in the next few days.

But an airlift to both sides of the divided city could not deliver medical supplies, let alone urgently needed food, blankets and plastic sheeting, in the quantities required to alleviate civilian suffering in the approaching winter.

The ICRC, which supplies 40 hospitals and clinics across Kabul, needs 500 to 600 tons of medical goods to restock depleted stores for the next four to six months.

An ICRC convoy of medical supplies, the first for three months, has been stuck at Karte Seh hospital in the opposition- controlled southwest of the city for the past few days.

However Stocker said the opposition alliance led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and General Abdul Rashid Dostum had assured him on Wednesday that humanitarian supplies would be allowed to reach all parts of Kabul.

`Abdul-Aziz Alimi, the 36-year-old director of the Karte Seh hospital, said his team of 10 Afghan surgeons had operated on 2,500 people wounded in the past six weeks of bitter fighting in the mainly Shi'ite Moslem quarter.

"One rocket hit the children's ward, killing two wounded children and another one hit the drivers' room five days ago, but nobody was hurt," he said.

Stocker said lifting the opposition road blockade would allow new convoys to bring vital relief supplies to both sides of the city.