10:33am UK, Friday May 22, 2009

Stuart Ramsay,
Sky News chief correspondent

The UN is to launch an emergency aid appeal for more than one and a half million people displaced by the war between the Taliban and Pakistan’s army.

Thousands of people are fleeing their homes to tented villages in Pakistan

Tented camps are being overwhelmed by thousands of new arrivals fleeing the fighting in the Swat Valley and surrounding regions in North Pakistan.

The UN has estimated that it will need as much as £380m to deal with the tide of people.

It has described the situation as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.

The remains of burnt-out trucks and cars litter the main roads that link the major towns and cities in the valley, once a beautiful tourist destination.

A soldier stands by as the homeless file towards safety

Overhead, helicopter gunships having been attacking Taliban positions in the mountains and hills around Swat’s capital, Mingora.

The city streets are deserted but it is likely that tens of thousands of people are still there sheltering inside their homes.

So far, the Pakistani military has concentrated on Taliban bases in the countryside, but it expects to move towards the capital in the coming days.

The army’s spokesman, Major-General Athar Abbas, said the plan is to control areas around the major cities to cut off any escape routes for Taliban fighters before the military moves in to engage them.

“Operations have now started in the cities and towns but before we were fighting in the countryside; this was deliberately planned, to hit them hard,” he said.

Carrying their possessions, two children walk from the Swat Valley

How successful the military has actually been is difficult to ascertain as there is little media access allowed.

Pictures have been released of blindfolded young men described as Taliban by the military. The men said they were press-ganged into action by the Taliban.

For its part, the Taliban leadership said it remains in control on Mingora and other areas of the Swat Valley.

Indeed, the spokesman for the Taliban’s religious leader in Swat, Sufi Mohammed, insisted that there is no government control in the region at all.

The problem for the Pakistani government is that the displaced are in effect running away from the army’s guns and bombs and that could create even greater instability for the whole of the country.

In the camps militancy and anger is spreading amid the squalor.

With their homes being destroyed and their families being injured, resentment will certainly turn towards Islamabad.

That is why the United States and Great Britain are promising vast sums of money and why the Pakistan government is asking for more.

The aid simply has to get through, if it does not the backlash against the current government could be overwhelming.