By Irwin Arieff UNITED NATIONS, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Northeastern areas of the Central African Republic are seeing more ethnically driven attacks and torched villages in signs the war in Sudan's neighboring Darfur region increasingly is spilling over the border, the United Nations said on Friday. A U.N. assessment team sent this month to the isolated area estimates that violence targeting civilians there has driven about 40,000 of the area's 200,000 residents from their homes. A major problem is residents' fear of reprisals linked to ongoing fighting between Central African Republic forces and armed opposition groups, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. Armed raiders regularly loot villages and terrorize civilians in the remote and lawless area near the border with both Chad and Sudan. But the problem has worsened significantly in 2006, the U.N. office said. All three countries are shaken by conflict or civil war, and various rebel groups in all three use neighboring states as bases to launch attacks into the others. A second U.N. team is in the area studying how to deploy peacekeepers in the northeastern region, as well as in eastern Chad, to protect suffering civilians there and help provide them with humanitarian aid. As many as 1 million people -- a quarter of the Central African Republic's population -- have been touched by violence in various parts of the country, according to U.N. estimates. Across the country, as many as 220,000 people have been driven from their homes, including 20,000 who have crossed into Cameroon and 50,000 into Chad. The remaining 150,000 have been left homeless inside the Central African Republic, the U.N. office said. Political turmoil and decades of on-and-off fighting have left the Central African Republic the seventh least-developed country in the world, according to U.N. figures. Its population is among the earth's poorest. Health, education and social measures have steadily declined for 20 years, the world body says. More than 1 of every 5 children born in the country die before age 5. The United Nations has appealed for $49 million in aid for the country this year, but to date just $184,330 of that has been collected from member countries.
