Along with the US Black Hawks helicopters, it is the first contact with the outside world that the people of cut-off Saghar district, in western Afghanistan's dirt-poor Ghor province, have had for weeks.

In that time 300 people have died, locals and officials say.

"Every day three or four people have died most of them children. There are no medical facilities and there is no doctor," 30-year-old Mohammed Achim told

"Most of the people do not have enough fuel because they were not expecting this," he added, showing a piece of naan bread and saying that villagers were surviving on nothing but bread and tea.

From the back of the giant US military C-130 Hercules plane beans, flour and rations packs float to earth on parachutes, to be distributed later by a local tribal council.

US Army doctor and reservist Bryan Rick said that he had treated 30 children, three of whom were badly sick with either pneumonia or tuberculosis.

"They are not going to die but in the States they would have been hospitalised," he told AFP.

The village feels more stone age than 21st century, with the richest house furnished with only three carpets, a cushion and a woodstove.

People there are already undernourished and are also unhealthy as a result of constant intermarriage. Thirty-four people in the village, which lies 200 kilometres (124 miles) southeast of the main western city of Herat, are mute.

"If you talk about countries (in the region), Afghanistan is the poorest and if you talk about provinces, Ghor is the most deprived," district chief Ali Khan told AFP.

It was the 62-year-old who alerted the authorities to the plight of the area, being one of only a couple of officials in the mountain district of some 40,000 people with a satellite phone.

Khan, who says he has not seen a winter like it in almost a quarter of a century, since the Soviet occupation, told AFP that around 300 people have died in the last month and a half.

Ghor authorities claim that only 192 people in the province have died, but have little way of confirming deaths in the most inaccessible parts of the rugged region.

Khan and other locals however, said that many of the old and young have sickened and died in the freezing weather and families had not stockpiled enough fuel because no one expected such a harsh winter.

Black Hawks also landed in the neighbouring district of Tulak on Thursday, and were immediately surrounded by 200 people pushing to get rations until they were ordered to line up and wait by 12 policemen.

Ghulam Nabi, 45, takes the food gratefully, but by Sunday his family of nine will need more.

"I am very happy to take the food, but it is only enough for two nights for our family and then we will be hungry again," he told AFP.

There is no hospital in the district, only a spartan clinic with three rooms, and not enough medicine to treat the mounting number of people sick from the cold, locals told AFP.

"My daughter was only five months old and she got sick in the cold and died," said 29-year-old Mohammed Asar as he waited for food handouts.

Meanwhile the villages are awaiting more food supplies from the provincial capital Chaghcharan, but convoys from the World Food Program were snowed in miles away.

As the Black Hawks flew journalists back to the US airbase in Shindand in western Afghanistan, two WFP trucks could be seen surrounded by snowdrifts in a remote valley.

There was a lone man trying to dig them out of the snow, surrounded by nothing but mountains and silence.

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