Pakistan Flood

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The Pakistani Taliban called the presence of foreign relief workers in this flood-ravaged country “unacceptable” on Thursday and obliquely suggested that militants could carry out attacks against members of aid groups, according to news reports.

A spokesman for the United Nations dismissed the threats, saying that security concerns had not affected its aid work thus far. Still, any violence would add more strain to relief efforts that have been slow to reach the millions of Pakistanis uprooted by the worst flooding in the country’s history.

The United Nations spokesman, Maurizio Giuliano, said relief workers would continue their efforts and that the group would not be intimidated by “threats of insecurity, let alone rumors of such threats.”

“We are here for the people and will continue to deliver,” Mr. Giuliano said. “Any potential attack against us would be against the people of Pakistan, whom we are here to assist.”

Hard-line groups in Pakistan have tried to assert their influence amid the chaos created by the floods, with the Taliban urging people to reject aid from the United States and Islamic groups stepping in to provide aid in the breach left by the government’s faltering response.

Azam Tariq, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, told The Associated press on Thursday that the United States and other groups providing aid had ulterior motives.

“No relief is reaching the affected people, and when the victims are not receiving help, then this horde of foreigners is not acceptable to us at all,” he told The A.P. “When we say something is unacceptable to us one can draw his own conclusion.”

In Pakistan’s southern Sindh Province on Thursday, floodwaters forced more evacuations involving tens of thousands of people as the swelling waters of the Indus River breached an embankment at Surjani, government and aid officials said.

“Around 40,000 people are on the move Thursday as floodwater inundated dozens of villages and threatened three main towns in the district,” Fawad Hussein, a spokesman for the United Nations humanitarian agency, said by telephone from Sindh Province. “The number can rise to 100,000.”

The Indus River flows through Thatta District in Sindh Province. The towns of Sujawal, Bathoro and Daro also were in danger of being overrun by floodwaters, Mr. Hussein said.

Mr. Hussein said water levels in the Arabian Sea also were rising, forcing the Indus River to flow in the opposite direction. “Due to this, we are expecting flooding in Badin, as well,” he said, referring to a neighboring district.

He added that elsewhere in Sindh, 600,000 people in Jacobabad and 100,000 people in Qambar and Shahdadkot had already been evacuated.

Brig. Mehmood Sadiq of the Pakistani army, who is overseeing the rescue operation near Surjani in Thatta, told local news outlets that the army was rescuing people stranded by the floods, while the civil administration had issued warnings to residents of Sujawal on Thursday morning to evacuate the area.

“In the first phase, we are concentrating on moving people to safer locations,” Brigadier Sadiq said. “In the second phase, we would start rescuing people who are left behind or remained stranded.”

In addition to the army, Pakistan had sent 200 navy marines to help in rescue operations.

Monsoon rains led to flooding that began in late July in Pakistan. An estimated 1,600 people have been killed and about 17 million have been affected across the country, according to United Nations estimates.

The evacuations that began Thursday are likely to worsen the overcrowding in the refugee camps where flood victims have gathered across Pakistan. The aid organization Doctors Without Borders said it was planning to scale up its operations in the northern and southern parts of the country to curb the possible outbreak of waterborne diseases.

Doctors Without Borders posted on its Web site a dispatch from one its workers that described increasingly dire health conditions at a camp of flood refugees in Baluchistan Province in the north. A lack of clean drinking water in the area was creating a raft of health issues in the town of Dera Murad Jamali, the organization said. The town’s normal population of 50,000 appeared to more than double, the group said, and protests were growing over inadequate food and aid.

Earlier this week the United Nations said 3.5 million people in Pakistan were relying on contaminated water for drinking, bathing and washing. The United Nations’ refugee agency this week nearly tripled its target for financing emergency shelters, to $120 million from $41 million.