WASHINGTON, March 25 (UPI) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday that the United States was "confident" it could usher humanitarian supplies into the southern Iraqi city of Basra "very quickly."
"And as soon as the security situation resolves itself and as soon as the port of Umm Qasr is cleared so that ships can come in with humanitarian supplies, we're confident we can reverse the situation very quickly," Powell said.
Residents of the city were uprising against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen, a paramilitary group that has taken up positions inside the city, according to British Army intelligence officers attached to the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. Powell said he had heard these reports but could not confirm them as of yet.
But the fighting inside the city has so far prevented U.S. and Western aid workers from fixing the city's water purification plant. The U.S. Agency for International Development has a disaster assistance relief team already in Kuwait City that USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios said Tuesday was "ready to go," pending a military assessment of the security situation there.
"If the population is safe and it's safe to work in Basra and in Umm Qasr, then we can act within a day," Natsios said. "We're in Kuwait City right now and in Qatar, and we have people in Jordan, as well, and in Cyprus, where the U.N. headquarters is. So, we can act almost immediately. And our relief commodities are warehoused in Qatar and in Kuwait City."
Natsios said Tuesday that the biggest problem facing the 1.3 million citizens of Basra was the scant supply of potable drinking water for the city, which was nearly cut off because electricity has been cut off for its water plant. "The Republican Guard, or the Iraqi military headquarters, which is next door, has electricity, but the water plant does not," Natsios said. "The reporting we're getting is they shut off the water deliberately for the city." Natsios said, "This is a very calculated thing to increase the suffering of the population by the Iraqi military, who are obviously turning in a subtle way against their population already."
Natsios said teams would go in "to see whether the water supply in Basra meets the minimum requirements for human consumption. And if they don't, then we have to go in and either chlorinate the water to a greater degree or we install new equipment, which we have on reserve." USAID has numerous portable power generators ready to be deployed from Kuwait.
President George W. Bush authorized the shipment of 200,000 metric tons of wheat for immediate humanitarian relief last week in Iraq. In addition, USAID has put forward over $100 million for relief organizations including the United Nations and other relief groups such as the World Food Program.
Natsios said Iraqis had been issued double rations since October, leading him to conclude that he was "not worried" about starvation. "There's more than enough food in people's homes, we believe, to last about a month if there are no food distributions at all. Now, there may be some very poor people in some areas that sold all their food -- some people sold their food, took the cash and are hiding it because they thought they might have to move and it's easier to walk with cash than it is with food. In either case, they have resources," he said.
