ISLAMABAD - The United Nations said Monday it was withdrawing expatriate staff from northwest Pakistan, raising its security alert to the second highest level in an area thick with Taliban insurgents.The re-location orders apply to UN international staff working on long-term development programmes but do not affect humanitarian workers. UN officials were unable to specify the numbers of personnel involved.
"They will be relocated. Immediately," Ishrat Rizvi, a UN spokeswoman, told AFP in reference to the international staff deemed non-essential who previously made day trips into North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared a security condition known as phase four in the NWFP and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) -- with the latter avoided by expatriate UN staff for some time.
"The decision has been taken bearing in mind the intense security situation in the region," a UN statement said.
Phase four is the UN's second-highest security category.
Under the restriction, local UN staff can continue to work but expatriates are limited to emergency operations.
Last month the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) temporarily closed distribution centres serving more than two million people in the northwest because of security fears.
The closure, affecting the Swat region where Pakistan waged a blistering assault against Taliban fighters earlier this year, followed a suicide bombing of the WFP compound in the capital Islamabad that killed five aid workers.
Rizvi could not immediately say how many foreign staff would be evacuated.
"We don't have big numbers of international staff in that region," she said.
Billi Bierling, spokeswoman for the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Pakistan, said the new restrictions would not affect emergency operations currently underway.
The United Nations had a ceiling of 12 expatriate UN staff staying in NWFP overnight but said there were no restrictions on day trips.
Almost all the WFP food distribution centres in Swat have reopened, she said, giving supplies to those who had been displaced by this year's fighting, which forced around two million people to flee.
Further south, UN agencies are working through local partners to distribute food, blankets and other essentials to people displaced by a major military offensive that began last month in South Waziristan, part of FATA.
Up to 250,000 people have fled the offensive in that tribal region on the Afghan border and moved to neighbouring Dera Ismail Khan and Tank, a government official said Sunday.
But even before Monday's decision, security concerns had prevented the deployment of international staff to Dera Ismail Khan, Tank, or South Waziristan, Bierling told AFP.
Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked extremists have carried out a two-year campaign of attacks in Pakistan that have killed more than 2,000 people.
On Monday a bomber on a motorbike killed 35 people in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, neighbouring Islamabad.