500,000 Flee to Iran Border, U.N. Says : Refugees: The influx is posing huge relief problems. About 200,000 more foreigners are heading for Turkey to escape the gulf crisis.

Half a million foreign refugees from Iraq and Kuwait are massing at the Iranian border, and 200,000 more are heading for Turkey, posing huge relief problems, U.N. agencies said Friday.

The U.N. Disaster Relief Organization said it is trying to arrange a fleet of buses to help deal with the influx to Iran across newly opened borders with Iraq, its former war enemy.

Iran opened the frontier in mid-August after accepting Iraq’s peace overtures, but Tehran’s resources are already stretched dealing with the swap of 100,000 prisoners from the eight-year war, a U.N. spokesman told reporters.

About 200,000 Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Chinese are on their way to the Turkish border from Iraq to join about 1,000 already there, the spokesman said.

Jordan until now has borne the brunt of the exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees, mainly guest workers from Egypt, the Indian subcontinent and Asia, since Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion and later annexation of Kuwait.

The U.N. spokesman said a survey Thursday evening put the total number of evacuees in Jordan at 90,000. Of those, about 10,000 were awaiting evacuation in the port of Aqaba and the rest were evenly divided between camps in Amman and along the Iraqi-Jordanian border.

“Between Thursday and Friday alone, 9,200 Bangladeshis, 5,000 Pakistanis, 4,000 Sri Lankans and 1,000 Filipinos crossed into Jordan,” the U.N. spokesman told reporters.

“Our top priority is getting them home,” he said.

But U.N. agencies in Geneva said the refugees pose huge problems for their home countries even if they manage to get out of teeming desert camps.

Countries such as Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Philippines are often ill-prepared to handle either the transport or the influx of refugees.

The U.N. Disaster Relief Organization has appealed to the world community for $15 million and already has $8 million from Japan.

A spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said the cost of evacuating Egyptians will be met largely with a $60-million grant from Saudi Arabia.

Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka plan to start airlifts today, and a Pakistani ship is on its way to Aqaba.