IRANIAN authorities passed out food and medicine to the several thousand Iraqi Kurds allowed to cross the border yesterday, while refugee women were warned to cover up.
Public works vehicles arrived from Marivan in the Iranian province of Kurdistan, the closest large city, to begin preparing the ground at a former market area where 6,000-8,000 Iraqi Kurd refugees were huddled.
The situation remained precarious and a number of young children were suffering from colic. Tehran continued to press for the rapid arrival of international aid to prevent, the interior ministry said, a "humanitarian catastrophe".
Iranian women dressed in black chadors arrived at the refugee site of Bashmagh and asked the Kurdish women to cover themselves up as required by the Islamic republic. Local officials have been angered by Kurdish women who are not wearing veils in front of Iranian soldiers.
The Marivan governor, Mr Ali Yari, said that the decision to let the refugees stay was made after four people had been killed and another 150 wounded over the past two days by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) forces and Iraqi soldiers.
Iran said it had welcomed a total of some 39,000 Iraqi Kurd refugees who fled the fighting in northern Iraq.
Iraqi Kurd refugees also gathered at camps in the border posts of Kaleh and Tileh Kooh, inside the Iranian provinces of West Azerbaijan and Kermanshah, said Mr Ahmad Hosseini, head of the interior ministry's immigration department. Iran had also provided aid to some 160,000 people on the other side of the border, he was quoted as saying by the Iranian news agency, IRNA.
"Although our policy was clearly to provide assistance to these people on the other side of the border, we are letting them in when their lives are endangered," he said.
Mr Hosseini said he was in contact with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees about co ordinating assistance.
Meanwhile, hundreds of Kurdish refugees returned to their homes in northern Iraq after fleeing this week for fear President Saddam Hussein would regain control of their embattled region.
Sulaimaniyah was the last stronghold of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) overrun in a largely bloodless nine day takeover of northern Iraq by its Baghdad backed rival, the KDP.