The Afghan capital Kabul got its first mobile telephone system today, giving UN officials and government ministers easy international dialling from the phone-starved city.
The Swedish telephone company Ericsson provided 200 telephones and all the necessary equipment in an initiative with the United Nations to provide reliable communications quickly to disaster areas, UN spokesmen said.
Kabul, the best-connected city in all of Afghanistan, has only 32,000 landline phones for more than a million residents.
It has three separate systems, some badly damaged by the last 23 years of war, and anyone who can afford it simply bypasses them all and uses a satellite telephone.
"This is a great example of the private sector helping the United Nations," said Ahmad Fawzi, spokesman for the UN special envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, who received the first telephone.