A war against Iraq could force up to two million people to leave their homes and seek safe haven elsewhere, US officials warned last night.
Officials were taking part in a White House briefing aimed at revealing how Washington planned to address humanitarian issues in the event of US-led military intervention in Iraq.
'We're planning on two million internal refugees,' said Andrew Natsios, administrator of the US Agency for International Development.
But Elliott Abrams, special assistant to President George W Bush and director for Near East and North Africa at the National Security Council, cautioned that the figure reflected a 'catastrophic' scenario and that the actual number could be much lower.
Natsios said Americans had devoted themselves over the past several months to a 'massive pre-deployment of supplies' in the Gulf region that would enable them to bring assistance to the Iraqi population as fast as possible.
Abrams believes that 750,000 Iraqis have already left their country while another 800,000 have been displaced inside Iraq since Saddam Hussein came to power.
According to the White House adviser everything will be done to 'minimise displacement, damage to the infrastructure and disruption of services' in the event of military intervention.
