UN assisting Afghan refugees from Bam

In collaboration with local authorities, aid organisations and UN agencies in the western Afghan border city of Herat are working to assist hundreds of Afghans that have returned to their homeland following last week's devastating earthquake in the southwestern Iranian city of Bam, many of whom have returned to bury their dead. The news follows reports from the Afghan-Iran border that thousands of Afghan refugees who lived in the city were heading home, after the deadly quake ripped through the ancient city on 26 December, killing at least 30,000 people and leaving thousands more homeless. On Wednesday, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) announced it was preparing to help returning Afghans from Bam. "WFP is providing both transport services and food assistance to those families suffering the devastating trauma of having lost their loved ones and their belongings in Bam at the same time," Maarten Roest, a public affairs officer for the food agency told IRIN on Thursday in Kabul. And while exact figures had yet to emerge, WFP said that according to Iranian government sources the death toll among Afghans living in Bam amounted to some 3,600 people, most of whom had already been buried in the city itself. However, authorities in Afghanistan's southwestern Herat and Farah provinces bordering Iran, foresee that up to 700 deceased may be brought into the country by their families. "At the same time WFP has allocated enough food to give each family member - up to 3,000 people - a three-month ration and is pre-positioning a total of 780 mt of wheat and 21 mt of pulses," Roest said, noting they had also loaned 100 mt of high energy biscuits intended for Afghanistan to the emergency in Bam. Meanwhile, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told IRIN from Herat that over 220 corpses had arrived in Afghanistan in the border provinces of Nimruz, Herat and Farah. UNHCR said the most affected province had been Farah, while emergency food and non-food items were on the way to reach victims' families who had already arrived. "Today food and non-food items were sent to Farah for 250 families who might or have already arrived," Claire Bourgeois, the head of the agency's western area office said. According to the refugee agency, it had considered some extra assistance to Bam returnees in addition to its routine return package normally provided. "We already have the return packages for returnees but we do have some additional resources for Bam returnees as they have lost so much," Filippo Grandi, UNHCR's chief of Mission told IRIN in Kabul. To date, Grandi said that they had helped repatriate between 200 and 300 families of those Afghans who had been affected by the earthquake, "and we are now helping the repatriation of those Afghans who used to live in Bam and now want to go to Afghanistan for one reason or the other." The chief of mission said the government of Iran had registered three thousand Afghans [living] in Bam, "but we don't know how many survived." Meanwhile, Afghan authorities in Kabul told IRIN, that the minister of repatriation had travelled to Bam to assess the situation and to deal with the situation of Afghans there. "Minister Inayatullah Nazari has been sent by the Afghan government to give moral support to the Afghans there and also to express the solidarity of the Afghan government with Iran," Habibullah Qaderi, chief advisor at the ministry of refugees and repatriation told IRIN in Kabul. According to the Afghan official, only up to seven hundred corpses of Afghans had been identified so far, noting several hundred would wish to repatriate to bury relatives inside the country.