International Red Crescent aid workers in the southern Afghanistan city of Marjah, Helmand province, reported that US warplanes had dropped leaflets on the area warning people to leave or be killed.

The Taliban has inflicted a huge number of casualties on the US-led occupation forces in Marjah.

Commander of more than 55,000 foreign fighters in Afghanistan US General Stanley McChrystal claimed that the leaflets were directed at Taliban militants.

Hee added that the offensive against the city, which has a population of 80,000, was intended to "re-establish security."

Red Crescent spokesman Bijan Farnoudi warned that the Afghanistan government did not seem prepared to deal with an exodus of refugees and revealed that medical posts in the province were already recording an increase in the number of patients with bullet or shrapnel wounds.

Mr Farnoudi reported that the Taliban was not preventing anyone from travelling away from the expected battle zone and Afghan government refugee agency head Ghulam Farooq Noorzai estimated that 90 to 100 families, amounting to more than 1,000 people, had already left the Marjah area.

Prior to the US-led offensive, which will be the first major attack on a Taliban-controlled region since US President Barack Obama announced a 30,000 troop increase in the occupation forces in December, Afghan soldiers visited local tribal elders to warn them to stay off the roads.

But Marjah tribal elder Mohammed Hakim said that people were "more afraid now. Everybody is worried that they'll get caught in the middle of the fighting and that they will have no choice but to leave their land."

"But if I have to leave my fields for months and months, how will I feed my family?" he asked.

Meanwhile, two more British soldiers were killed in Helmand, taking the toll of British military casualties during the occupation of Afghanistan to the same level - 255 - than were killed by Argentinian forces during the 1982 Falklands war in the south Atlantic.

The Morning Star