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Geneva, July 4 (Reuters) - United Nations humanitarian agencies said on Friday they were urging the Kenyan government to drop an anti-terror ban on flights to and from Somalia they believe is depriving six million people of badly needed help.
The children's agency UNICEF and the World Food Programme said the ban, about to enter its third week, meant they could no longer get regular supplies of food or medicines into central and southern Somalia or continue school-building programmes.
"It is becoming more and more difficult to help these people, many of whom are desperately in need," UNICEF Geneva spokesman Damien Personnaz told a news briefing. Major child immunisation programmes were seriously affected, he said.
The WFP's Christiane Berthiaume said all international agencies involved in getting aid into Somalia, most of whom work from Nairobi, were negotiating with the Kenyan authorities to reinstate aid flights at least.
"The ability of the UN and its partners to assess the needs and carry out humanitarian interventions...is being increasingly undermined by the flight ban," a UNICEF statement quoted its Somalia representative Jesper Morch as saying.
Kenya, which has seen several serious terrorist incidents blamed on Muslim fundamentalists in recent years, imposed the ban on June 21, saying it feared people planning new attacks could board flights from Somalia.
Rival factions in the largely Muslim country who have been battling for power for well over a decade recently formed a transitional national government, but it has little power outside the Somali capital of Mogadishu.
The head of that administration, Abdulkassim Salat Hassan, last month complained about the Kenyan move and said reports of the existence of terror cells in the country had been spread by warlords seeking to extend their own power.
UNICEF said some two thirds of Somalia's estimated population of 6.5 million people live in central and southern parts of the country, including most of the urban poor and refugees from the years of factional fighting.
They are spread across a large geographic area with little access to humanitarian assistance.
Personnaz said supplies could still be trucked in from Kenya, but this involved a long and dangerous journey, and was not practical for medicines that have to be kept refrigerated.
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