Cold, disease and malnutrition were the biggest killers and relief groups said they could not reach snowed-off areas to help after the poverty-stricken province of Ghor was hit by the harshest winter in a decade.

"Several hundred to a thousand would be a low estimate of the number of children that could have died," Paul Hicks, program director western region Afghanistan for Catholic Relief Services, told AFP.

Afghan and UN officials said Thursday that the cold snap had claimed at least 267 lives in Afghanistan in the past month, many of them children. Thousands more people are thought to be stranded in remote areas.

Hicks said a 10-person team from his organisation had hiked to 16 villages which had been snowed in and had found five children had died in each hamlet in Ghor's Sharack district.

"Eighty children died last month -- most in the last 10 days or two weeks and what is getting them is the cold and lack of food, because they are already undernourished due to the drought," Hicks said.

Afghanistan has suffered from a lengthy drought in recent years which has caused misery for poverty-stricken farmers and people throughout rural areas.

Hicks said his team had reached only a fraction of the 250 villages in Sharack district alone and had not been able to get through to any others in neighbouring Tulak and Saghar districts.

Deputy Provincial Governor Ikramuddin Rezaie told AFP that tens of thousands of people were facing a food shortage in remote villages.

"It is a serious challenge -- if not taken care of it will cause a human catastrophe," he said.

Rezaie joined aid workers in calling for help in getting relief to some of the worst hit areas and said local authorities were struggling to clear roads and get relief to the isolated villages.

Geno Teofilo, communications manager for World Vision, which has seven clinics in the province, said 28,000 people were at risk in Ghor from the cold, disease and related health problems.

Because the roads have been blocked and daily efforts to clear routes are wiped away by heavy nightly snowfalls, food and other humanitarian aid is stranded with UN agencies in western Afghanistan's largest city of Herat.

"The most urgent need now is to get helicopters up to the most remote areas to determine how serious the situation is and provide relief where it's needed," Hicks said.

"Most of Ghor is isolated right now. We are not even talking about communities which are remote and far-flung but the district centers, which are normally accessible, are isolated right now," he said.

Deputy governor Rezaie said a team of doctors sent from Kabul by the Ministry of Health were yet to reach the remote villages as most of the roads remained blocked.

"If they don't send the supplies by air it wouldn't be possible to make it by road," he said.

Two convoys of trucks with supplies donated by the World Food Program remain stranded on the road between Herat and Chaghcharan, the capital of Ghor province.

"We are considering sending the supplies or the aid by air but the decision has not been taken yet," said WFP spokesman Maarten Roest.

Ghor is one of the most isolated and impoverished parts of Afghanistan, and even in the summer the journey by road from Herat to Chaghcharan can take up to 15 hours.

"Part of the problem with Ghor is that it is so underdeveloped. Reliable numbers are impossible to find and going there is like travelling back in time about 1,000 years," said World Vision's Teofilo.

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