UN to relocate Afghanistan staff in wake of fatal attack

THE United Nations is to temporarily relocate more than half its staff in Afghanistan following last week's deadly Taleban attack.

The UN mission is still reeling from a pre-dawn assault on a guesthouse in the capital Kabul last week that left five UN staff dead.

The attack was the most direct targeting of UN staff during the organisation's decades of work in the country.

Some 600 non-essential staff will be moved for four to five weeks to more secure locations while the body works to find safer permanent housing, spokesman Aleem Siddique said.

The majority of the UN's 1,100 international staff in Afghanistan live in the capital, spread out among more than 90 guesthouses.

The plan is to consolidate those living arrangements so staff can be better protected, Mr Siddique said. He stressed this was not a pull-out or a scale-down in operations.

About 80 per cent of the UN's staff in Afghanistan are Afghan citizens.

"We've been here for over half a century and we're not about to go any time soon," Mr Siddique said.

In the attack on 28 October, gunmen wearing suicide vests stormed a guesthouse where dozens of UN staff lived, killing five UN workers and three Afghans.