A mobile hospital was being set up Sunday in a Taliban-run refugee camp just inside Afghanistan where up to 7,000 people are waiting to get into Pakistan.
Pro-Taliban religious group Markezaldawa Irshad Lashkerthiaba told AFP three doctors would man the post at the Spin Boldak camp where conditions are said to be rapidly deteriorating.
An official from the party said permanent medical camp, including a mobile operating theatre would be established at the camp which is close to the Chaman cross point in southwest Pakistan.
"This camp will also have an ambulance service," he said, adding that the hospital would be capable of treating dozens of patients a day.
"If we find more doctors are needed we will try to send more," the official said.
The organization said it sent 10 trucks of food and medicine to Spin Boldak on Saturday. Nine truckloads of aid were sent Friday.
Aid workers on Friday said conditions in Spin Boldak were heading toward crisis point.
"We are going to face big, big troubles. I'm very afraid because there are lots of children there who are chronically malnourished," Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) team leader Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa told AFP.
MSF is one of the few aid groups to have a worker in Spin Boldak, where three dusty makeshift staging posts house up to 7,000 Afghans who are fleeing the US bombing.
Zabalgogeazkoa said there was no order in the camps and sanitation was virtually non-existent. There is only limited running water and nutritious food.
On some days up to nine or 10 war wounded were being carried in, he said, adding that hospitals in the nearby Afghan city of Kandahar, which has come under heavy and sustained bombing, were full and had inadequate supplies.
The Pakistan border is closed to all but the most needy – AFP
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
