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Thick black smoke hangs over Baghdad. It wafts into homes through windows left open to guard against shattering amid the frequent bombings.

Dominican priest Yousif Touma lives in Iraq's sprawling capital. An active distributor of Scripture to the country's Christian minority, Touma said many children are wailing in fear with their huddled families.

"We are afraid that the war will be long," Touma said. "We are not afraid for our property. We are afraid for our lives."

With bombs pounding mostly military targets in Baghdad 15 hours a day, and a humanitarian disaster looming in the rest of the country, Iraqi Christians and international relief agency officials fear that bottled-up aid may be too little, too late for thousands. More than 500,000 Iraqi children were malnourished even before the war, partly due to United Nations sanctions against the regime for its weapons programs.

"Many people will be in need because our country is weak after 13 years of sanctions," Touma told Christianity Today. "We want Christians to pray and make sure that nongovernmental organizations can bring supplies all over the country."

So far, battlefield obstacles have hampered relief efforts. The United States Agency for International Development assembled a rapid-response team, pre-positioned food and supplies, and worked with private humanitarian groups on a coordinated response.

In March the agency released 600,000 tons of wheat, enough to feed Iraq's 22 million people for six weeks. The problem is getting it to hungry people. USAID estimates that the country's current annual grain production of 2 million metric tons is less than half of what is required to meet minimum nutritional needs.

For now, few Christian relief organizations are in Iraq. However, many coordinate their work through the Middle East Council of Churches, based in Beirut. The MECC has 16 distribution centers across Iraq, each with two or three employees. The MECC is monitoring Iraq's borders with Jordan, Iran, and Syria, bracing for a flood of 600,000 refugees. The United Nations World Food Program is preparing to feed 900,000 refugees for a month.

Few refugees have crossed the border so far. After the Gulf War in 1991, many refugees returned to Iraq, only to find their homes looted. Tor Valla, a water engineer with Norwegian Church Aid, thinks that may be why relatively few have left their homes in the war's opening days.

Steve Matthews, an emergency relief communications manager for World Vision, said the Gulf War of 1990-91 also saw an initial trickle of refugees that quickly became a flood. An estimated 2.3 million Kurdish Iraqis fled to Turkey and Iran after that conflict.

World Relief, World Vision, Church World Service, and Food for the Hungry are among the agencies working at two camps in Jordan, one set up for Iraqi refugees, the other for Third-Country Nationals (TCNs) who are starting to flee Iraq for their home countries. Jordan aims to repatriate as many as possible, and relief agencies are planning for 60,000 TCNs.

The United Nations does not grant TCNs refugee status, and thus will not help them through its usual refugee programs.

Founded during the Gulf War, a coalition of 10 Jordanian churches and agencies, the Jordanian Evangelical Community for Relief and Development, took the initiative to organize a TCN camp in the desert town of Ruweished, about 200 miles east of Amman, the capital. Thirty volunteers with the coalition are providing $8,000 worth of food daily to inhabitants.

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May 2003, Vol. 47, No. 5