MOSCOW (AP) Russia plans to send an additional team of doctors and sappers to Afghanistan to boost its humanitarian work in the capital Kabul, the Emergency Situations Ministry said Tuesday.

"I will order that the personnel of our medical center in Kabul be beefed up," Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu said during a telephone conference with the Russian field hospital in Kabul, according to the Interfax news agency.

Valery Vostrotin, who heads the hospital, said that between 200 and 300 Afghans wait in line daily to see Russian doctors. He also said that sappers had neutralized 683 explosives over the past four days while erecting a field camp in Kabul.

Shoigu said that a team of sappers, who recently returned from Kosovo, should be sent to Afghanistan.

Russia, whose military forces withdrew from Afghanistan in defeat in 1989, opened the field hospital this week in a bombed-out military complex in the center of the Afghan capital. Russia is one of the few countries that has sent an envoy to Kabul, now under the control of the northern alliance, which Moscow has actively supported.

The Russian field hospital is staffed by 90 Emergency Situations Ministry employees. Afghans initially appeared skeptical and wary of the armed guards who protect the site's entrance.

But the Russian government has insisted that the hospital is evidence of the good relations between Russia and Afghanistan.

Shoigu said that during the first phase of Russia's humanitarian aid program for Afghanistan, seven Il-76 planes had delivered 175.2 metric tons (192 short tons) of cargo from Tajikistan to Kabul. But he complained that the ferry route between Tajikistan and Afghanistan was hampering the delivery of further supplies.