Japan will extend $6 million in humanitarian aid to Iraq to help the country deal with residents displaced by civil unrest, but the funds aren't expected to help beleaguered medical groups struggling in the country.

A Red Cross nurse who has been helping refugees in conflict-torn Iraq said she sometimes finds herself in a dilemma between providing timely relief supplies and staying safe.

"We have so many things that are obstacles to our activities," Chiyuki Yoshida of the Japanese Red Cross Society Wakayama Medical Center told reporters in Tokyo on Friday.