"Because of the clearing of forests, the elephants have no land to live on and so they are entering human settlements," Desma Murni from WWF told AFP.

"If there is no strategy to deal with this, more and more elephants will be killed or poisoned," said Murni.

The so-called Flying Squads will be equipped with noise and fire-making tools along with trained elephants and will immediately help out villages who have been terrorised by some 17 elephants in recent weeks.

Last week six elephants were found dead in a palm oil plantation close to Lido Forest and were believed to have been poisoned by local farmers, WWF said in a joint statement with the agency.

The poisonings were the latest in an increasing number of violent conflicts between humans and the endangered species.

Environmentalists blame the widespread clearing of the elephants' habitat, to make way for palm oil plantations and farmland, for increasingly frequent clashes between the last of Sumatra's wild elephants and humans.

"Forest conversion is the root cause of the conflict between people and animals, whether it is elephants raiding fields or tigers attacking livestock," the WWF's Nazir Foead said in the statement.

The number of Sumatran elephants, Asia's smallest elephant, has plunged in Riau province, home to massive palm oil plantations, from as many as 1,600 in 1985 to 350 to 400 today, according to the Nature Conservation Agency.

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