Help For Afghan Quake Victims

Three mobile hospitals set up by international troops began treating earthquake victims in the devastated region of Nahrin on Friday, as aid workers and villagers braced for rains that could wipe out roads and slow the delivery of aid to a crawl.

At one of the hospitals, set up earlier in the day by German, Dutch and Danish peacekeepers normally based in Kabul, a team of five doctors treated six people for infected wounds and burns, but performed no major surgeries.

"That's what we expected," said Lt. Col. Mathias Brockman, a German doctor. "Four days after the earthquake, you won't find major injuries."

Maj. Frank Hoermann, another doctor from the German contingent, was more blunt.

"The worst cases have been cared for already - or have died," he said.

Two Russian mobile hospitals, also began taking patients Friday in the desperately poor area of Nahrin, which was worst hit by Monday's 6.1 magnitude temblor, Itar-Tass news agency reported.

The earthquake and its aftershocks dislodged many rocks and mines, sending them tumbling onto roads once considered safe. An estimated 95 percent of the roads had been cleared again by Friday, and supplies were flowing well, according to aid groups.

"Nobody will die because they have no food," said Simon Pierre, in charge of food distribution in northeastern Afghanistan for the French relief agency ACTED.

But storm clouds have been gathering and the expected rain could again wipe out roads and again cut supplies off, said Joerg Denker, the northern Afghanistan program manager with the aid group Mercy Corps.

"People are starting again to get nervous," Denker said. "Tents are also not sufficient shelter for rains if they last two to three days, and then it's again a disaster."

In preparation, aid workers began frantically digging trenches through their camp in Nahrin, making channels that they hoped would direct the water away from their tents.

Muhamed Rahim, a 38-year-old northern alliance soldier, said rains in the area normally cause such flooding in the streets of Nahrin that people have to stay inside for their own safety.

But Rahim's house was destroyed in the earthquake, and now he lives with his 11 family members in one of the many tents dotting the area, which he worried would not survive a downpour.

"The tent is our life," Rahim said.

The death toll from the earthquake has been confirmed at 600, but is expected to rise to between 800 and 1,200 as more bodies are pulled from beneath collapsed mud-brick houses, according to the United Nations. Thousands more were injured, and an estimated 100,000 have been left homeless.

An estimated 20,000 people were camped in the open on freezing hillsides, fearful of returning to the town because scores of aftershocks brought down mud buildings which survived the original quakes.

"This has turned into a logistical nightmare," a foreign aid worker on the spot said. "Rain is the last thing we needed. These poor people."

At the mobile hospital set up by the European peacekeepers, Hoermann's first patient was 14-year-old Sahid Mustafa. The teen-ager had deep burns to his right hand that had gone untreated since the earthquake.

"If we weren't to treat him now we'd have to amputate in a few days," Hoermann said.

The 120 troops from the 4,500-strong International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, were dispatched from their assigned area of Kabul to help set up the medical facilities at the tent camp, some 105 miles north of the capital. But temporarily working outside Kabul was nothing more than an emergency response, said Lt. Col. Thomas Loebbering, a spokesman for the German forces.

"This definitely does not mean an extension of the mandate of ISAF outside of Kabul," Loebbering said.

U.S. and British Chinook helicopters had ferried 200,000 lbs of aid, including rice, beans, wheat, dates, water, blankets, tents and medical supplies to Nahrin, U.S. military spokesman Major Bryan Hilferty said.

International agencies have also managed to get aid supplies to a central distribution point in Nahrin, but the greater challenge is to get them to the scattered population of about 80,000 in the surrounding district.

"The aid is here, but it is difficult getting it to people," a U.N. spokesman said. "People are fearful of coming back into the town because of aftershocks, so they are staying on open hillsides."

The security troops are expected to stay in the region for four to five days, while the military medical personnel are to stay longer.

Maj. Gen. John McColl, the British head of the peacekeeping force, Brig. Gen. Carl Hubertus von Butler, the German commander of the Kabul brigade, and German ambassador Ranier Eberle scouted the area in the morning to see what was needed.

"We've come to have a good look at what our troops are doing, how they're doing it, and how long they will have to stay here," McColl said.