age News Feb 28, 2003 www.aljazeerah.info

Al-Jazeerah, News

Aid agencies fear epidemics and disease could sweep Iraq if any U.S.-led military assault targets ailing public services, particularly power plants.

Already some five million Iraqis, or one in five of the population, do not have access to safe drinking water, which together with poor sanitation has been a main cause of the country's soaring infant mortality rate, aid officials say.

Military strikes against power stations, such as those carried out in the 1991 Gulf War, could quickly plunge national electricity-driven water and sewage systems into crisis, risking a surge in diarrhoeal disease, cholera and typhoid, they say.

"It is a big concern because there is a direct link between safe water and rates of disease," said Wivina Belmonte, Geneva spokeswoman for the United Nations Children's Fund.

"The public health situation in Iraq is already alarming," added the official, whose organisation will head relief work for water and sanitation in the event of war in Iraq. When a Nato force drove Serb troops out of the Yugoslav province of Kosovo in 1999 and in the first Gulf War that followed Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, power stations were bombed because they were said to have military importance.

Military analysts doubt U.S. forces or their British allies would go after public installations this time if war starts. The Geneva Conventions, which lay down the rules of warfare, bar attacks on civilian facilities

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