The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) suspended on Wednesday its delivery of food rations to hundreds of thousands of displaced people in the Muslim majority-Moro after a series of bomb attacks this week, officials said.
Five bombs have exploded on the southern Mindanao island and nearby Jolo island since Saturday, killing eight people and wounding nearly 90, Reuters said.
A powerful bomb exploded on Wednesday morning at Marina St., Jolo, Sulu in the morning yesterday, Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) said on website. Initial report stated three persons were killed and 24 others wounded, including three Muslim policemen assigned in the town of Jolo.
The United Nations and some foreign embassies in Manila have imposed a travel ban this week on restive areas in the south after the bomb attacks, concerned over the safety of hundreds of foreign and local staff, said Alghassim Wurie, WFP acting head.
"Our staff were supposed to visit refugee centres on Mindanao island this week to validate the actual number of displaced people," Wurie said, adding the travel ban forced them to suspend operations in the south.
But the biggest new internal displacement of people last year was in Muslim region in Philippine, where 600,000 fled government offensive against MILF, a United Nations-backed report said.
"We hope and pray the security situation there would calm down in the weekend and if this will happen, we will resume our operations next week," he said.
Nearly 350,000 people have been displaced by fighting which has escalated in the oil and gas-rich marshlands on the southern island of Mindanao in the last two months, pushing back peace talks stalled since August 2008.
The WFP has distributed nearly 12,000 tonnes of rice to about 600,000 displaced families in six Muslim provinces since August 2008.
The displaced families are staying in tents pitched on marshlands.
Filipino military launched an offensive in Moro region later since August last year when Supreme Court cancelled an agreement, signed between the Philippine government and MILF.
After four decades of armed conflict between the Filipino state and the Moro Muslims, the two parties agreed to sign an agreement that would end battle. However, the supreme court of the Philippine declared the agreement "illegal" on August 4, which caused the conflict to resume.
The Philippines, an archipelagic country located in the western Pacific Ocean, has a population of 90 million people. The population of Muslims is about 12 million. Between the years 1450 and 1515, two Islamic principalities were founded on the islands of Sulu and Mindanao.
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