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.