U.N. agencies say almost 160,000 people have been forced out of their homes in Georgia and the breakaway region of South Ossetia by fighting between Georgia and Russia.
After reaching the town of Gori in central Georgia on Sunday - the first time U.N. organisations had got into the city since it was captured by Russian forces as they fanned out from South Ossetia into the Georgian heartland - staff from the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, estimated that 30,000 people had fled within South Ossetia, plus almost 99,000 in the rest of Georgia. Another 30,000 were estimated to be displaced to Russia.
The convoy from UNHCR and World Food Programme found Gori deserted apart form 50 to 60 people waiting in the town centre for assistance. They said both shops and private homes showed signs of wide-scale looting.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), which compiles estimates from a range of agencies and government sources, said 40,000 people had been displaced from Gori alone.
IDMC's own estimates put the number of displaced in the tens of thousands. The group says at least 80,000 ethnic Georgians and Ossetians have fled their homes, on top of 220,000 to 240,000 already displaced by conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the early 1990s.
Security around the region remains unpredictable. Earlier on the same day the UNHCR/WFP convoy made it to Gori, a UNHCR security mission was unble to get through via the same route.
UNHCR said it couldn't verify media reports of thousands of Georgians fleeing to northwestern Turkey. Its staff in Ankara said they hadn't so far registered unusual movement across the Georgian-Turkish borders.
With Georgia practically cut in two, UNHCR said it was planning to airlift aid to some 15,000 displaced people trapped in the western part of the country.
And although summer temperatures in the disputed territories are now in the 30s Celsius (high 80s Fahrenheit), the U.N. agencies said they were already starting to plan for winter.
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