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LONDON (AlertNet) - The main worry for relief agencies if there is a U.S.-led attack on Iraq is the prospect of fresh damage to the country's infrastructure, already in tatters from sanctions and two decades of conflict, and how Iraqis will cope if water, electricity and food supplies are cut.

International NGOs in the government-controlled centre of the country, the largely Shia south and the Kurdish north are planning for a new emergency.

"We'd like to think otherwise, but we're preparing for the outbreak of war," Kathryn Wolford, president of U.S.-based agency Lutheran World Relief (LWR), told AlertNet. "As a humanitarian organisation, we have a responsibility to save lives in the event that war breaks out. So we're mapping material and human resources that can be mobilised."

Brendan Paddy, emergencies press officer of Save the Children UK, told AlertNet by satellite phone from northern Iraq: "From our point of view as humanitarians, the important thing is that people do not lightly dismiss the likely humanitarian consequences of any military action on a society where people are so vulnerable.

"For the people I've been speaking to (in northern Iraq), there's a slightly different concern, and that's that people not forget that they are more than just pawns in some larger game.

"The greatest concern that expressed to me is that they must not be left unprotected."

The Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) said that estimates of civilian deaths in the event of a U.S.-led attack ranged from 10,000 to 100,000.

In a report on its website, CAFOD says: "The casualties will mount very fast, especially when indirect deaths, from disease or as a result of the expected displacement of populations, are taken in to account."

"The casualties will mount very fast"

Paddy said his main fear in the event of an attack would be the deliberate or accidental destruction of infrastructure such as electricity, water, sewerage and hospitals, already creaking under the weight of 10 years of tough international trade sanctions since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

The CAFOD report quoted George Gelber, the agency's head of public policy, as saying about two-thirds of the country's 23 million inhabitants were largely dependent on government rations and the oil-for-food programme administered by the United Nations since 1996 to compensate for the humanitarian consequences of sanctions.

"There are few if any coping mechanisms once the food distributions are disrupted and water and sanitation systems collapse," Julian Filochowski of CAFOD said in a statement.

Paddy said he asked a man how he would survive if food distributions stopped, and was told: "I would have to rely on God. There is no other way."

Under the oil-for-food programme, food is distributed in the north by the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) and in the south as government rations with U.N. supervision.

DISTRIBUTION COULD BE PARALYSED

CAFOD said that distribution could become paralysed if bridges, roads, warehouses and power plants were destroyed, and if the staff usually responsible for distribution were dispersed.

Paddy said: "Most of the food is stored in the south and centre of Iraq, so in the event of hostilities, the food supply (to the north) could be cut off very quickly. In the south and centre the food would probably no longer be supplied to the civilian population. It could take time to arrange an alternative supply."

Robert Yallop, head of overseas operations and programmes for CARE Australia, told AlertNet after a visit to Iraq that the country would probably be unable to extract oil and pump it into loading terminals during a conflict and food suppliers would be unlikely to meet the terms of their contracts.

"In the event of hostilities, the food supply could be cut off very quickly"

Rations in the centre and south not only provide food, Yallop said, but for about 40 percent of the population were also a primary source of income if sold or bartered.

Nada Doumani, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) media relations officer for the Middle East and North Africa, told AlertNet the ICRC was pre-positioning food in the region.

Paddy said: "All of the humanitarian agencies here have emergency preparations that they're making. They're very keen that those preparations are not seen to be explicitly linked just to the possibility of attack on Iraq."

LWR's Wolford said that, if an attack on Iraq was averted, supplies in the region could be well used elsewhere, not just in Iraq but also in the Palestinian territories.

Paddy said: "We already have existing supplies, mainly of non-food items. It's very difficult to store appropriate amounts of food. In the past in conflicts here, there's been significant displacement. If that happens in the winter, the most immediate needs will be tents and warm clothes, to make sure that people don't die of cold."

According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees, there were about 700,000 internally displaced people in Iraq in 2001. It estimated that there were one to two million Iraqi refugees in the same year, although only about 300,000 had formal recognition of their status.

"They will be joined by hundreds of thousands more," said CAFOD's Gelber.

However, Iran, Turkey and Syria have said they would close their borders.

Paddy said: "A lot of people are saying that experience of 1991 was so bad that whatever happens, people will be reluctant to flee to the border. People may gather around the main population centres, or in other scenarios they may head for the villages and the hills."

In March 1991, more than 450,000 mainly Kurdish people fled from the Iraqi military to the Turkish border within a week.

"1991 was so bad that whatever happens, people will be reluctant to flee to the border"

The Turkish authorities closed the border, leaving several thousand Iraqi Kurds stranded in the mountains. Over the next month, a further 1.3 million Kurds fled to Iran and were granted refuge there. In addition, about 70,000 Iraqis, mostly Shias, fled their homes in the south.

The scale and pace of the population movements exceeded the forecasts of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

NGOs said they planned to continue providing assistance in the region, even if there was a U.S.-led attack.

FUEL SHORTAGES

Yallop said CARE's local staff in Iraq would attempt to maintain humanitarian operations, as long as it was safe enough and they could deal with fuel shortages or restrictions on movement.

Save the Children's Paddy said: "In the event of any future conflict, access will become a critical issue, because of the position of the neighbouring states and because you may not always have the full cooperation of all the military parties to any conflict, despite their obligations to allow us access to people in need.

"In any emergency -- whether it's natural disaster or conflict -- you always have to have good coordination."

Kenneth Bacon of U.S. advocacy organisation Refugees International said coordination was difficult. "The United States doesn't want to reveal details of its war plans. The U.N. is reluctant to look like it is in league with the United States in planning for a war that Secretary-General Kofi Annan says he hopes can be avoided."

Paddy said that agencies had experience of working in conflicts involving Western powers.

"Contacts with the military remain limited"

"One of the principles arising from situations such as Kosovo and Afghanistan would be the importance of the separation of the humanitarian and military action. That is very much at the forefront of people's minds from the major international NGOs. It's a major item of debate."

Bacon wrote in an article for AlertNet that NGOs did not want to get too close to the military, for fear they would appear to be humanitarian agents of the attacking forces.

However, he said there was increasing dialogue between NGOs and the U.S. government. "Contacts with the military remain very limited."

A few relief agencies -- including the ICRC and CARE Australia -- operate in south and central Iraq but there is a much greater international presence in the north. Muzaffer Baca, vice-president of Turkish agency International Blue Crescent, said 134 NGOs were operating in northern Iraq.

Paddy said: "NGOs and the U.N. together are a very significant employer in the north and clearly any changes to the status of the operations of those agencies would potentially have significant consequences for many people's livelihoods.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) said in a report in December that many Iraqis believe that a U.S.-led strike is inevitable.

The ICG said: "For the Iraqi people , who since 1980 have lived through a devastating conflict with Iran, Desert Storm, a decade of sanctions, international isolation and periodic U.S./U.K. aerial attacks, a state of war has existed for two decades already...While for the international community, the question is whether or not a war should be waged, for ordinary Iraqis...the question...is whether a state of war will be ended."