Aid agencies are starting to talk about stepping up assistance to Iraqis - and the humanitarian needs are certainly high - but how on earth do you do that in a country where aid worker throats have been cut and international symbols of neutrality bombed to smithereens?

Instead of answering the question, a lot of humanitarians have ended up seeing security as an end in itself, and the duty to give humanitarian assistance has got lost, according to some of the aid workers who've been involved.

So it's timely that the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq has just come out with some guidance, practical suggestions and clear-headed assessment of what's worked and what hasn't worked for both international and local aid agencies.

International agencies have shifted from an initial flood of NGOs setting up shop in Iraq in the run-up to the U.S. invasion five years ago to almost universal withdrawal after a series of brutal attacks in 2004. And now most of those who've carried on providing aid do it remotely, often with international managers based in Jordan controlling the work of national staff in Iraq.

But the current system isn't really working, for a variety of reasons.

Most importantly, it's not meeting Iraqi people's needs.

Aid agencies have come full circle in their thinking on whether Iraq is a humanitarian emergency or not. They started off preparing frantically for large-scale displacement in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion. That didn't really happen - Iraq's displacement crisis came considerably later as sectarian violence spiralled out of control.

And I remember there were some attempts at training to deal with situations that might involve biological weapons. That scenario also failed to materialise.

So there was a gradual shift in the early days - at least among most European organisations - towards the idea that Iraq wasn't really a humanitarian crisis. A lot of people suspected that aid work in the country wasn't quite ethical because it might contribute to propping up the U.S.-led invasion, which made many agencies uncomfortable.

At the same time, growing insecurity - underlined by the bombing of the bombing of the headquarters of both the U.N. and the Red Cross - made working in Iraq increasingly dangerous. Aid agencies pulled out in droves.

IRAQIS IN NEED

But over the past couple of years, aid agencies have been forced to admit that however it got to this, Iraqis are suffering, and there's a growing will to try to respond.

"As the crisis in Iraq and its impact on civilians have worsened, humanitarian assistance has not kept pace," says a new briefing from the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) at the London-based think tank Overseas Development Institute.

The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross now says the humanitarian situation in Iraq is among the most critical in the world, with health care, water and sanitation services and electricity supplies ravaged by war and international sanctions before that.

We're talking about a situation where the number of people who've been uprooted is almost too big to imagine - 2 million who've left Iraq, and another 2.4 million who've left their homes for safety somewhere else in the country. That's more than Darfur. It's way more than the entire population of Los Angeles. It's almost as many people as the whole of Norway!

About 4 million Iraqis need food aid, HPG says, and one in four children is chronically malnourished. Just one in three children has access to safe drinking water, according to HPG's briefing.

And yet, HPG says: "The majority of assistance to the displaced and vulnerable has been provided by communities themselves."

Iraq has certainly claimed an appalling number of aid workers' lives. Since 2003, 94 aid workers have been killed, 248 injured, 24 arrested or detained, 89 kidnapped or abducted, according to the NCCI's figures.

Humanitarianism and security is such a complex topic that now you can even do a Master's degree in it at Britain's University of Warwick, near Coventry.

But the briefings for NCCI, by Canadian aid worker Greg Hansen, say the death toll has made a lot of agencies regard staff security in Iraq as an end in itself, rather than as a way of facilitating humanitarian operations in the safest reasonable conditions.

"Preoccupations with security - and mainly the security of international staff - have often eclipsed the fundamental principle of humanity, the humanitarian imperative to protect and assist people in urgent need," Hansen says.

There are definitely risks, but the NCCI says agencies could have boosted their profile since 2006. It says keeping your head too low isn't giving aid work a good name, since it's usually so undercover it's invisible or so bunkered away it's divorced from reality.

LONG-DISTANCE BOSSES

For the international agencies still working in Iraq, the widespread practice of managing operations remotely from Jordan is problematic. It's not very satisfying for the managers, who would rather be closer to the action, and it's demeaning to the people taking the orders and running all the risk.

The best way of doing it long-distance seems to be by agencies who give support, money, backing and advice to colleagues or partner organisations in Iraq, rather than the ones who keep all the decision-making outside the country, Hansen says.

Of course, no one should be playing with their employees' lives, but Hansen argues that it is possible to work in Iraq if agencies tread wisely and keep their footprint small.

If an organisaiton works through local relationships, Hansen says, it can keep its security measures unobtrusive. And if it does most of its work through partners and local commercial service providers, and has a local face, it will probably be welcomed.

An agency, on the other hand, that depends on lots of conspicuous infrastructure will attract unwanted attention and find it hard to be flexible. Trying to keep staff safe with very visible security measures will inevitably raise suspicions that the organisation is in cahoots with the U.S.-led troops in Iraq. And using international staff and international companies will give it a foreign face that won't really be accepted.

The United Nations, which is scaling up its work in Iraq, has notoriously centralised management structures that make it especially hard to adapt to the kind of strategy Hansen is recommending.

Meanwhile, there are some highly effective Iraqi NGOs that have excellent local access but find it hard to get on donors' radar, he says.

SMART WORKING

So if international agencies are going to step up to the mark, how can you do it safely?

To start with, you can't make a blanket security assessment across the whole country the whole time, Hansen points out. If you've got good links in local areas - and that might mean talking to armed militias - you can make judgements day by day, place to place.

And what kind of profile should you keep?

If you keep a small footprint, Hansen says, it's possible to work without armed guards. Maybe you can put magnetic labels on vehicles with the agency's logo when you're distributing aid, and take them off when you leave. Or maybe you can share an office with a local organisation.

But one of the most important things is to pay close attention to good management and good staff, and make sure local staff - who know which ethnic groups will be welcome in which areas - can see what's going on and why, and have a hand in it.

The work is unbelievably tough some of the time, and agencies need to cushion staff morale to avoid people getting discouraged and leaving. And you need to think about the consequences right from the first contact with a potential employee, to avoid the security risks of disgruntled employees if they have to be fired.

However committed staff are, there's a risk of communal tension in the office when people are under pressure and things aren't transparent.

The same goes for aid that's targeted at specific communities. If displaced people are getting all the help, for example, that can create resentment in other people living nearby under conditions that are just as hard.

It's a lot to take into account, and a lot is at stake, but some agencies are managing it.

Hansen says: "(A) number of international and Iraqi aid organisations - some very large and some very small - have found creative ways to strike a balance between the need to keep staff reasonably safe in an unstable war environment while preserving - and even expanding - their access to Iraqis in need."

Let's see who else rises to the challenge.

Greg Hansen's briefings are on the NCCI website

The HPG briefing on Iraq is online too

Hansen wrote about how international aid agencies have made a bad name for themselves with Iraqis by putting their staff security above the humanitarian imperative in a report for the Feinstein International Center of Tufts University in Boston.

And he's argued in Forced Migration Review about how donors should do more for Iraq.

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