Negative Blogs

Two Russian pilots were abducted on Sunday in the city of Nyala in Sudan’s South Darfur province, the country’s SUNA news agency reported on Monday.

Both pilots were employees of the Khartoum-based Badr Airlines, the agency said without giving further details. The airliner provides cargo and passenger air services for various international aid programs.

The civil war that broke out in the western region of Darfur in early 2003 has claimed the lives of more than 300,000, according to United Nations estimates, and forced 2.7 million people from their homes. Sudan puts the number of dead at 10,000.

Abductions of foreigners, including aid workers and peacekeepers, have been on the rise in the war-torn region in the past months. In most cases, foreign nationals are being abducted for ransom.

In the most recent similar incident, a Mi-8 helicopter of the Russian aviation company UTAir was seized by an armed tribal group in late July. The helicopter, with a crew of four Russians, later returned to its base in Nyala.

Three Americans were killed in Afghanistan Saturday, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said.

Two of the U.S. service members died in a bombing in southern Afghanistan. The third death followed an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan. No other details were immediately available.

The casualties came as the top American diplomat and top U.S. general in Afghanistan reassured the troubled nation of U.S. support.

“Now looking ahead, we’re all focused together on the upcoming parliamentary elections and the key test will be the satisfaction of the Afghan people with the progress that’s going to come from their hard work as they approach the elections — their incredible reputation for perseverance and their indomitable spirit,” said Amb. Karl Eikenberry, speaking to Afghan journalists with Gen. David Petraeus.

Meanwhile, Afghan and coalition soldiers fought off assaults on two military bases that left more than 20 insurgents dead, ISAF said.

The fighting occurred in Khost province, a volatile region on Afghanistan’s rugged border with Pakistan.

Insurgents clad in U.S. military uniforms and wielding rocket-propelled grenades and small arms “simultaneously launched attacks” against Forward Operating Base Salerno and Forward Operation Base Chapman, ISAF said.

Chapman is the same base where a suicide bomber killed seven CIA officers on December 30.

Troops killed about 15 insurgents at Salerno and six at Chapman. Five insurgent fighters were captured and were in ISAF custody.

A Haqqani network operative who helps carry out bombings and two other insurgents died in an airstrike while fleeing Salerno in a vehicle. Two insurgents who got into Salerno were killed by soldiers. The Haqqani network is a militant group with ties to al Qaeda.

“We are tightening our grip on the insurgents and as a result they are attempting anything and everything as a last ditch effort,” said U.S. Army Col. Rafael Torres, ISAF spokesman. “The insurgents gave their best effort and came up short.”

Afghan police and ISAF members seized a car bomb and a vehicle carrying ammunition. Forces also seized suicide vests, rifles and unexploded munitions.

Four ISAF soldiers were injured, and three have returned to duty. The fourth was set to return to duty soon. No base facilities were damaged.

Also Saturday, an Afghan civilian was killed by a suicide attacker in southeastern Paktika province, ISAF said. Seven people also were wounded when the insurgent detonated a suicide vest.

By the CNN

Mario Santos likely never made it to the United States.

The 18-year-old set out 10 years ago from his native El Salvador in search of opportunity and a better way of life. But he had to travel north through Mexico first.

A short while after leaving, he called his parents to tell them he had been beaten and robbed in Mexico, left penniless and without shoes or clothes. It was the last they heard from him.

While it’s not certain that Santos is dead, he probably suffered the same fate as 72 migrants from Central and South America whose bodies were found this week in a ranch in northern Mexico, just 90 miles from the U.S. border. Officials are investigating whether they were the victims of human traffickers or drug cartels that prey on migrants.

It’s a fate that officials say befalls thousands of Central and South Americans every year.

“It’s brutal,” says Peter Hakim, president emeritus of the Inter-American Dialogue, a non-partisan Washington policy institute. “This is very big business. It’s very brutal.”

It is indeed big business. Human trafficking is one of the most lucrative forms of crime worldwide after drug and arms trafficking, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in April.

In Mexico, it is a $15 billion- to $20 billion-a-year endeavor, second only to drug trafficking, said Samuel Logan, founding director of Southern Pulse, an online information network focused on Latin America.

“And that may be a conservative estimate,” Logan said.

That money, which used to go mostly to smugglers, now also flows into the hands of drug cartel members.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan, nonprofit policy institute based in Washington, noted in an August report that human smuggling and other illegal activities are playing an increasingly important role as narcotraffickers diversify their activities.

“The drug cartels have not confined themselves to selling narcotics,” the report said. “They engage in kidnapping for ransom, extortion, human smuggling and other crimes to augment their incomes.”

Some cartels have come to rely more in recent years on human smuggling.

“For the Zetas, it’s been one of their main revenue streams for years,” Logan said about the vicious cartel, which operates mostly in northeastern Mexico.

Cartel involvement has increased the risk for migrants crossing through Mexico to get to the United States, said Mexico’s National Commission for Human Rights. An investigation by the commission showed that 9,758 migrants were abducted from September 2008 to February 2009, or about 1,600 per month.

No one knows exactly how many people try to make the passage every year.

The human rights organization Amnesty International estimates it as tens of thousands. More than 90 percent of them are Central Americans, mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, Amnesty International said in a report this year. And the vast majority of these migrants, the rights group said, are headed for the United States.

“Their journey is one of the most dangerous in the world,” Amnesty International said.

“Every year, thousands of migrants are kidnapped, threatened or assaulted by members of criminal gangs,” the rights group said. “Extortion and sexual violence are widespread and many migrants go missing or are killed. Few of these abuses are reported and in most cases those responsible are never held to account.”

An indication of how many people attempt the trip can be found in statistics compiled by Mexico’s National Migration Service, which tracks how many migrants are detained and returned to their countries of origin each year. Experts note that these are only the migrants who get caught, and that many — even most — are not apprehended.

Nonetheless, the Mexican agency said it detained 64,061 migrants last year, 60,383 of whom were from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. About 20 percent of them were females and about 8 percent were under the age of 18. Some were under 10.

Officials in El Salvador, where the teen-aged Santos started his trip, estimate that about 10,000 Central American migrants suffered some kind of abuse in 2009.

“The vast majority has been committed by these organized crime gangs, such as the Zetas for example, in the route along the Gulf (of Mexico), which is where they operate most frequently,” said Juan Jose Garcia, the Salvadoran vice minister for citizens living abroad.

“But we also have found events in which (Mexican) authorities have participated,” Garcia said.

The Salvadoran Foreign Ministry estimates up to 150 citizens leave each day for Mexico. Some analysts put that figure at closer to 300.

For most Central Americans, that journey begins with a human smuggler, commonly called a “pollero.” In the United States, the smugglers are better known as “coyotes.”

For a set fee, usually ranging from $850 to $5,000 a head, a smuggler will deliver a migrant to the border of the United States or even offer passage across.

Problems often arise when smugglers and migrants approach the border and organized crime organizations get involved.

“This is where things get complicated,” said Logan, who is writing a book on the Zetas and is the author of “This is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13 America’s Most Violent Gang.”

The drug-trafficking organizations charge the “polleros” a price per person for the right to cross over their territory, a practice called “derecho de piso,” or right of passage.

Or they will abduct the migrants and hold them for ransom from their relatives and friends in the United States or family back home.

Often times, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said, migrants who are abducted are subjected to sexual or labor exploitation.

If the migrants are being held for ransom and the money is not paid in time, the situation can get ugly.

“Sometimes the Mexican organized crime group says, ‘The hell with it. We’re not going to deal with these people,’ and they kill them all,” Logan said.

That’s what may have happened, Logan said, to the 72 people whose bodies were found Tuesday in a ranch building in Tamaulipas state, about 14 miles (22 kilometers) from the town of San Fernando, near the border with Texas.

Or the migrants may have refused to work for the cartel, which is one possibility that has been mentioned in news accounts.

A bloody turf war between the Zetas and the Gulf cartels also may have complicated matters because the smugglers may not have known who to pay or may have paid one group and angered the other.

“In Tamaulipas, it’s very hard for a pollero to know who is who,” Logan said. “The Zetas and Gulf cartels were once allied and now have split.”

At any rate, the involvement of the drug cartels has changed the dynamics of human smuggling in Mexico, said Andrew Selee, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute.

Selee remembers living in northern Mexico a few years back and knowing that a father-son duo who lived on his block were “polleros.”

“That’s gone,” Selee said, noting that the costs of having to pay cartels for the right to cross their territory has driven out small-time smugglers.

“They now have to be big enough to handle those costs,” Selee said.

Selee and the Inter-American Dialogue’s Hakim point out that increased border security and interdiction by the United States also has led to cartel involvement because of the level of sophistication and complexity now often involved in getting someone across the border. The cartels already have the routes and other facilities in place they use for smuggling drugs.

“We’re no longer talking about a simple process that involves one or two individuals,” Selee said. “This has become much more dangerous.”

As always, profit is the motive.

“The smuggling became profitable the more the United States began to build barriers to immigration,” Hakim said.

On Thursday, Amnesty International called on the Mexican government to take swift action about the slayings of the 72 people in Tamaulipas.

“Amnesty International issued a report in April highlighting the failure of Mexican federal and state authorities to implement effective measures to prevent and punish thousands of kidnappings, killings and rape of irregular migrants at the hands of criminal gangs, who often operate with the complicity or acquiescence of public officials,” the rights group said in a release.

“This case once again demonstrates the extreme dangers faced by migrants and the apparent inability of both federal and state authorities to reduce the attacks that migrants face. The response of the authorities to this case will be a test.”

It’s too late for the families of the victims.

For the parents of Mario Santos, the Salvadoran who disappeared 10 years ago, much of the anguish lies in not knowing what happened.

“If only he would call me on the telephone and I would know he is alive, even if I never saw him again, that would satisfy me,” said his father, Daniel Santos.

For thousands of Central American families, the phone does not ring.

By Arthur Brice

With 33 miners trapped deep underground, Chile is seeking advice from NASA on how to keep them mentally and physically fit for the months it may take to rescue them.

“We received a request from the Chilean government about advice related to our life science research,” John Yembrick, a NASA spokesman, told SPACE.com Wednesday.

The U.S. space agency, which routinely trains astronauts to cope with the isolation of months-long International Space Station missions, is providing survival tips to Chilean officials, who are able to communicate with the miners trapped 2,300 feet (700 meters) below the Earth’s surface. The rescue mission could take up to four months, according to press reports.

NASA officials are currently in a meeting to discuss further details.

“Right now, we’re still waiting to find out what specific questions they have for us, and how best we can assist,” Yembrick said.

The small gold and copper mine in the northern Chile collapsed Aug. 5. On Sunday rescuers were able to dig a 6-inch-wide tunnel to reach the miners, the Houston Chronicle reported. But it could take four months to complete the rescue, which involves drilling a 2-foot-wide (0.6- meter) tunnel through 2,200 feet (670 meters) of solid rock.

The trapped minershave been able to live so far off of limited food and water supplies in an area the size of a large living room. A physician on the rescue team said that the miners started out eating two spoonfuls of tuna, a sip of milk and a biscuit every 48 hours, the Houston Chronicle reported.

“Psychologically speaking, we have to try to keep them on the right track and not give them false hope that it will be a short rescue,” the Reuters news agency quoted Chile’s Mining Minister Laurence Golborne as saying.

As time passes, NASA may be able to suggest ways for the miners to cope with the tough physical and psychological conditions.

Physicians have recommended that the miners do regular exercises to  prevent muscle atrophy as they await extraction, Reuters reported.

By Foxnews

Tuesday night’s deadly China plane crash highlights the risks in China’s booming air travel industry. A disproportionate number of flights now have to take off and land at night without proper lighting.

The China plane crash that killed 42 people late Tuesday night was a rare blot on the country’s aviation safety copybook, say experts here. But it highlights the risks of flying in and out of some small regional airports at night, something more airlines are forced to do to meet the demands of China’s booming travel industry.

A domestic Henan Airways passenger jet crashed and burst into flames at a fog-shrouded provincial airport near Yichun in Northeastern China, killing 42 and injuring 54, according to official reports.

It is still not known what caused the accident “but from news reports I deduce that the reason is human error,” says Wang Yanan, deputy editor of Aerospace Knowledge magazine. “I think it came down too fast or too steeply.”

It emerged Wednesday that another airline, China Southern, decided last August to avoid night flights into Yichun. A technical note on the airline’s website said that “in principle there should be no night flights at Yichun airport,” citing worries about landing strip lighting, weather conditions, and the surrounding hilly terrain.

The newly built airport, one of a number of such regional facilities springing up all over the country to serve China’s booming travel industry, sits in a forested valley. China will have 244 airports by 2020, up from about 175 today, according to figures from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC.)

“Over the last few years, because of the high demand and big market, regional aviation has developed very fast,” says Mr. Wang. “The quality of personnel and facilities may not be keeping up.”

Tuesday’s crash, however, was the first major commercial airline accident in China for nearly six years, Wang points out. “I think it is an isolated case,” he adds. “In general aviation safety in China is normal.”

The government credits this to a nationwide crackdown on safety that it ordered in 2004, upgrading aircraft and airports, after 10 serious airplane crashes in four years had given China a notoriously dangerous reputation.

But at new airports a disproportionate number of flights take off and land at night, because airlines serving them can no longer get daytime slots at the busy hubs they fly to and from.

“At night in Northern China it is often cold and wet, so it may be foggy,” Wang points out, suggesting that Yichun airport’s landing lights may have been too weak to see properly in Tuesday night’s fog. “Small airports should install the right sort of equipment to cope with different conditions,” he adds.

The China plane crash that killed 42 people late Tuesday night was a rare blot on the country’s aviation safety copybook, say experts here. But it highlights the risks of flying in and out of some small regional airports at night, something more airlines are forced to do to meet the demands of China’s booming travel industry.

A domestic Henan Airways passenger jet crashed and burst into flames at a fog-shrouded provincial airport near Yichun in Northeastern China, killing 42 and injuring 54, according to official reports.

It is still not known what caused the accident “but from news reports I deduce that the reason is human error,” says Wang Yanan, deputy editor of Aerospace Knowledge magazine. “I think it came down too fast or too steeply.”

It emerged Wednesday that another airline, China Southern, decided last August to avoid night flights into Yichun. A technical note on the airline’s website said that “in principle there should be no night flights at Yichun airport,” citing worries about landing strip lighting, weather conditions, and the surrounding hilly terrain.

The newly built airport, one of a number of such regional facilities springing up all over the country to serve China’s booming travel industry, sits in a forested valley. China will have 244 airports by 2020, up from about 175 today, according to figures from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC.)

“Over the last few years, because of the high demand and big market, regional aviation has developed very fast,” says Mr. Wang. “The quality of personnel and facilities may not be keeping up.”

Tuesday’s crash, however, was the first major commercial airline accident in China for nearly six years, Wang points out. “I think it is an isolated case,” he adds. “In general aviation safety in China is normal.”

The government credits this to a nationwide crackdown on safety that it ordered in 2004, upgrading aircraft and airports, after 10 serious airplane crashes in four years had given China a notoriously dangerous reputation.

But at new airports a disproportionate number of flights take off and land at night, because airlines serving them can no longer get daytime slots at the busy hubs they fly to and from.

“At night in Northern China it is often cold and wet, so it may be foggy,” Wang points out, suggesting that Yichun airport’s landing lights may have been too weak to see properly in Tuesday night’s fog. “Small airports should install the right sort of equipment to cope with different conditions,” he adds.

By Peter Ford

The U.S. military says the number of its troops in Iraq is now less than 50,000, the lowest level since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. 

The announcement comes ahead of an August 31 deadline to switch the U.S. mission in Iraq from combat to training and counter-terrorism.

President Barack Obama had promised the lower levels shortly after taking office.  He also reaffirmed a prior agreement to remove all U.S. troops by the end of next year.  

But the terms appear to be somewhat fluid.   U.S. troops were still manning key positions in Baghdad this year, long after the June 2009 announcement they had withdrawn for Iraqi cities.

Peter Harling is a senior analyst on Iraq with the International Crisis Group, based in Syria.

“I’m not sure you can draw a line very clearly between combat troops and troops conducting an advisory mission,” said Harling. “I think Americans will remain armed and very vigilant when it comes to their own security.  But indeed there is no doubt that the U.S. wants to withdraw.  I think, U.S. policy in Iraq boils down to withdrawal; there’s not much more to it than bailing out.”

U.S. popular support for the war has fallen over the years, as casualties mounted and no clear victory appeared in sight. 

Tuesday’s announcement coincides with Iraq’s continued struggle to form a new government, five months after inconclusive elections.  

Harling says that many of the basic questions about a post-invasion Iraq remain unresolved, including power sharing, and the clearly-defined role of the military, the constitution and various branches of government.

“You can add to that, obviously, relations between Sunnis and Shi’ites, Arabs and Kurds, Iraq and all its neighbors - none of these questions have been answered,” added Harling.  “So withdrawing at a high pace, within the context of a framework which gives the U.S. very little flexibility, when all these questions remain unanswered is obviously a gamble.”

A recent increase in violence has raised fears that the U.S. drawdown, along with Iraq’s political vacuum, could further embolden insurgents.

U.S. officials said last week that they will increase the number of private security forces in Iraq by as many as 7,000.  The duties of the temporary contract workers would include protecting U.S. officials.

By Elizabeth Arrott

General David Petraeus, the top commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said the Afghan Taliban’s momentum has been reversed in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, as well as near Kabul.

The top commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan said Monday that Taliban momentum has been reversed in areas that had been its stronghold.

Gen. David Petraeus also said that US forces would not begin an “exodus” from Afghanistan in July 2011, the deadline for beginning the withdrawal of US forces.

His remarks come after a deadly summer for US troops in Afghanistan, with casualties at their highest rates since the invasion in 2001. The US is in the middle of an attempt to turn around the war, as it did in Iraq, with a troop increase. President Obama ordered an additional 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan last fall, for a total of 100,000, and the number of foreign troops in the country is scheduled to peak in the coming weeks.

Petraeus made the remarks in an interview with the BBC that was broadcast on Monday. He said NATO forces had reversed the momentum the Taliban gained in the past several years in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, as well as near Kabul. He said NATO forces will regain momentum in other areas as well, but that challenges remain.

“You not only have to reverse the momentum, you have to take away those sanctuaries and safe havens that the Taliban have been able to establish over the course of those years,” he said, adding that “that’s going to entail tough fighting.”

He seemed to warn that the high casualty rates for NATO forces could continue. ”When you take away areas that mean a great deal to the enemy, the enemy fights back. It gets harder before it gets easier,” he said.

The Associated Press reports that two members of the international force in Afghanistan were killed by roadside bombs Monday, one of them American. Four Americans died Sunday in heavy fighting in eastern and southern regions.

In the interview with the BBC, Petraeus also downplayed the July 2011 deadline for beginning troop withdrawal. “That’s a date when a process begins, nothing more, nothing less. It’s not a date when American forces look for an exodus and look for the exit and the light to turn off on the way out of the room,” he said.

He said American forces would begin to transition some of their tasks to their Afghan counterparts on that date, “in those areas where conditions allow it, and at a pace allowed by the conditions.” He also said he would offer the president his “best professional military advice” come July on whether the deadline is appropriate.

Those remarks echoed comments from a week prior that he made during a whirlwind media blitz that included interviews with NBC’s Meet the Press, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, when he said he did not go to Afghanistan to engineer a “graceful exit” and may recommend against any drawdown of troops next summer.

Some critics have have taken the president to task for setting a withdrawal date in Afghanistan. But Agence France-Presse reports that Petraeus, who was the architect of the Iraq “surge,” will try to replicate the strategy in Afghanistan in hopes that Afghan forces will be ready to take on more responsibilities next year. While the strategy in Iraq was to enlist Sunni insurgents to fight against Al Qaeda, in Afghanistan, Petraeus is pushing for the creation of Local Police Forces, “armed men paid by the government to defend their villages,” reports the AFP.

The Taliban may be feeling some pressure, reports The Christian Science Monitor, at least in its effort to maintain the loyalty of Afghans. It recently called for a joint commission to investigate civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

By Kristen Chick

As flood waters rose in Pakistan’s Sindh province submerging more towns, the country’s authorities have evacuated over 150,000 people, worsening the national catastrophe.

A government spokesman said on Saturday that residents of the town of Shahdadkot are fleeing to higher ground as waters from the freshly swollen Indus river overflowed its banks, submerging dozens of more towns in the south, the Times of India reported.

Pakistani authorities are meanwhile struggling to shore up an embankment holding back a growing tide on the edge of the town.

As the latest surge approached, Jamil Soomro, a spokesman for the provincial government, said that it had, within the past 24 hours, evacuated more than 150,000 people from the interior parts of Sindh.

According to officials, the floodwaters nationwide are expected to recede in the coming days as the last river torrents empty into the Arabian Sea.

Already, 600,000 people are in various relief camps that were set up in Sindh province during this past month’s flooding.

Meanwhile, doctors say that requests in the country’s camps have been mounting for more medicine and updated equipment to treat the victims.

“In the camp the necessary things we need are medicine and equipment. If we have updated equipment, then we can treat the patients well,” said Gulzar Hussain, a doctor struggling to run a field hospital at a government technical college in Nowshera, 27 miles east of Peshawar in the country’s northwest.

By Presstv

 

New Zealand conservation officials are planning another attempt to refloat at least 15 pilot whales that were part of a larger group that beached themselves early Friday.

The country’s Department of Conservation said it got a distress call Friday morning from a person who spotted 58 beached whales stranded on Karikari Beach, a remote area in the far northern part of New Zealand.

When conservation officials arrived only 15 of the animals were still alive.
“The focus for everyone right now was to try to refloat the survivors,” the conservation department said in a news release.

To do that, officials will position the whales to face out to sea and hope that they swim back out when high tide hits.

The whales “need to be held in the water for at least half an hour to allow them to re-orientate themselves, before being released to hopefully swim back out to sea,” the conservation department said.

A first attempt to refloat the whales was not successful Friday night and conservation officials were going to monitor the animals overnight in the hopes of trying again.

That next attempt would happen Saturday morning, said Mike Davies, acting area manager at the Department of Conservation Kaitaia office.

Adult pilot whales can measure up to 20-feet long and weigh up to three tons. Due to their social nature, they are often involved in mass strandings, according to the American Cetacean Society. The ACS is a non-profit group based in California that works to protect whales, dolphins and porpoises, according to its website.

By the CNN

UN warns numbers of people affected exceed those in Indian Ocean tsunami and Kashmir and Haiti quakes put together.

Bad weather is preventing the relief effort from reaching hundreds of thousands of the millions of people affected by heavy flooding in Pakistan.

The north-western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is particularly inaccessible, the United Nations said today, with up to 600,000 people marooned and rain stopping helicopters flying to some areas that are unreachable from the ground.

The devastation continued as the UN said the number of people suffering in the floods in Pakistan exceeded the combined total of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

While the death toll in the three earlier tragedies was much higher than the 1,500 people killed so far in the floods, the UN estimates that some 13.8 million people have been affected – at least 2 million more people than in the other disasters put together.

It made the comparison to emphasis the scale of the crisis, which the Pakistani prime minister said today was the worst in the country’s history.

“The number of people affected by the floods is greater than the other three disasters combined,” said Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.

Giuliano said a person is considered affected by the floods if he or she will need some form of assistance to recover, either short-term humanitarian aid or longer-term reconstruction help.

“The magnitude of the tragedy is so immense that it is hard to assess,” he added.

His statement came as the prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, said the floods were a bigger crisis than the both the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, which killed nearly 80,000 people, and the army’s operation against the Taliban in the Swat valley last spring, which drove more than 2 million people from their homes.

Rescue workers have been unable to reach up to 600,000 people marooned in the Swat valley owing to bad weather, Giuliano said, adding that many residents there were still trying to recover from last year’s fight with the Taliban.

“All these people are in very serious need of assistance, and we are highly concerned about their situation,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands of people have also had to flee rising floodwaters in recent days in the central and southern provinces of Punjab and Sindh as heavy rains continued.

One affected resident, Manzoor Ahmed, said that although he had managed to escape the floods that submerged villages and destroyed homes in Sindh, the subsequent lack of government help meant dying might have been preferable.

“It would have been better if we had died in the floods as our current miserable life is much more painful,” said Ahmed, who fled with his family from the town of Shikarpur.

“It is very painful to see our people living without food and shelter.”

Thousands of people in the neighbouring districts of Shikarpur and Sukkur camped out on roads, bridges, railway tracks any dry ground they could find, often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and perhaps a plastic sheet to keep off the rain.

“We were able to escape the floodwaters, but hunger may kill us,” said Hora Mai, 40, sitting on a rain-soaked road in Sukkur along with hundreds of other people.

By Adam Gabbatt