Iraq facing 'major humanitarian catastrophe'

The impending war in Iraq may cause a "major catastrophe," the co-ordinator of UN humanitarian assistance in the country said after his evacuation.

Ramiro da Silva spoke after flying to Cyprus with the last UN personnel to be evacuated from Iraq.

"I expect an aggravation of the situation of malnutrition and, of course, you have all the conditions in place for epidemics" for the millions of people in Iraq if war starts, da Silva said.

In the event of war, "you are going to have potentially massive needs, massive displacement of population, increase of epidemics, starvation -- if we are not ready enough to mount a response," he said.

"The problem in Iraq is that we have a situation that has been weakened by 13 years of very intrusive and harsh sanctions which debilitated the population in general in terms of poverty. Obviously, a conflict is a major disruption," he said.

The UN Security Council imposed sweeping economic sanctions on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

There have been reports of large numbers of Iraqis already leaving the capital, Baghdad, and of thousands of Kurds abandoning their cities in the northern Kurdish zone and taking to the snow-capped mountains along the Turkish border for safety.

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