Building has begun on refugee camps along Iran's eastern flank bordering Iraq as war looms inevitably close and ordinary people begin packing up the basic essentials of life as they prepare to flee to safety.
Diplomats and aid workers in the Iranian capital, Tehran, said yesterday that they expected the government to close the border with Iraq within days, in line with its war-time policy.
But once hostilities aimed at the Saddam regime were launched and Iraqis began arriving at the border, they would be assessed according to their needs, refugee co-ordinators said.
"The Iranian policy is to close the border in the event of war, but if there is a need for it in life-threatening situations, people will be allowed in," said Mr Fernando Del Mundo, spokesman in Tehran for the UN High Commission on Refugees.
Iran had identified 10 sites for Iraqi refugees and had begun work on three of them, "levelling the ground, building sanitation facilities, bringing in electricity", Mr Del Mundo said.
Iranian refugee facilities would have a capacity for between 200,000 and 250,000 refugees.
The UNHCR has said that preparations are being made in the countries neighbouring Iraq - including Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Iran - for a total of 600,000 refugees, most of whom were expected to cross Iraq's western frontier into Iran.
Iran's Red Crescent Society has identified Kermanshah and Ahvaz provinces as the most likely areas to come under pressure from an influx of displaced Iraqis.
Kermanshah would likely see people moving from the northern Kurdish no-fly zone, where people are expecting chemical attacks by Saddam once fighting begins. Mosul and Kirkuk, oil-rich centres near the border of the Kurdish region in Saddam-controlled territory, are also expected to see a massive outflow of residents, as Baathist forces have reportedly mined oil fields in the area against an expected allied occupation.
Ahvaz province borders southern Iraq, where predominantly Shia Muslims have been the target of Saddam's genocidal campaigns, including chemical attacks, in the past.
President Mohammad Khatami last week called on the international community to increase its financial support for Iran's refugee programmes.
"We are committed to our humanitarian obligations, but at the same time we expect the international community to help us," President Khatami told the visiting head of the UNHCR, Mr Ruud Lubbers.
Iran hosts more refugees than any other country, Mr Del Mundo said. Despite having repatriated 400,000 Afghans in the past year, more than two million remain in the country. As well, there are more than 202,000 Iraqi refugees, 48,000 of whom are still living in camps more than a decade after the last Gulf War.
The Iranian authorities calculate that each refugee costs the country $400 a year, but that the international community donates only $6 each a year for their upkeep.
A British parliamentary committee warned late last week that the international aid community was ill prepared for a war in Iraq, which it said would lead to widespread starvation, disease and devastation.
The International Development Committee said that a war aimed at regime change in Iraq would leave at least 10 million Iraqis without any source of food. War would destroy the country's transport, sanitation and irrigation systems, leading to water shortages, epidemics and delays in distributing supplies.
"Insufficient emphasis" had been placed on the likely impact on the population of a war, the report said, adding that there was a huge mismatch between the planning that had gone into the military campaign and preparations for the humanitarian impact it would have.