Some 230,000 people are facing possible starvation in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the UN food agency has warned. World Food Programme spokeswoman Lindsay Davies says the organisation has been unable to deliver any supplies to Kandahar for the past two weeks because of the deteriorating security situation there.

The city is the Taleban's last remaining stronghold and has come under heavy US bombardment over the last few weeks. The roads between Kandahar and the border town of Spin Boldak and between Kandahar and Herat are still considered no-go zones for lorry drivers.

Speaking in the Pakistani capital Islamabad, the WFP spokeswoman said she was more optimistic about the situation around Spin Boldak, on the Pakistani border. The UN agency - together with the non-governmental organisation Islamic Relief - is hoping to start distributing aid to the area this week.

It would be the WFP's first large-scale aid distribution to Spin Boldak since September.

Cool response

When a team of BBC correspondents entered the area about a week ago, they found large refugee camps near Spin Boldak, where thousands of displaced Afghans were living in appalling conditions. Over the weekend, the UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, warned that many other parts of Afghanistan were also still too dangerous for the international aid effort to be fully effective.

On Saturday, a WFP convoy of supplies arrived in Kabul - but only after the unarmed drivers had been robbed of their personal possessions along the route. The convoy of 47 lorries was ambushed by bandits during its journey from Peshawar in northern Pakistan.

Calls for a UN-backed multi-national force to protect aid convoys have so far received a cool response.

Slight improvements

In northern Afghanistan, a 59-truck convoy from the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) completed the four-day journey from neighbouring Turkmenistan to the city of Mazar-e-Sharif over the weekend.

It took 1,500 tonnes of aid for distribution to 65,000 people in and around the city.

But while senior UN officials say the situation in Mazar-e-Sharif was slightly improving, they have described the overall humanitarian situation in northern Afghanistan as a crisis of stunning proportions.

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