Britain's leading military mental health charity is dealing with more post-traumatic stress victims from the war in Iraq than veterans of all the Second World War jungle campaigns against the Japanese and survivors of their prison camps, its Scottish fundraiser said yesterday.

Colonel Clive Fairweather, former deputy commander of the SAS and now an organiser for Combat Stress north of the border, said the charity had added 208 psychiatric casualties from the fighting around Basra to its books in the past five years compared to 182 longstanding victims of imperial Japanese brutality.

Speaking at the launch of a Poppy Scotland appeal aimed at widening public awareness of the help on offer to a Scottish veterans' community estimated at one in five of the population, he added: "It used to take up to 14 years for the symptoms of PTSD to manifest themselves in servicemen who had been through traumatic episodes. By then, the condition was often chronic.

"Now we are seeing people in psychiatric distress less than 15 months after service in Iraq and Afghanistan. We already have three Afghan veterans on our books in Scotland and 29 in England and Wales since the summer of 2006."

Poppy Scotland, the organisation behind the annual Poppy Appeal, also premiered a moving short film in tribute to veterans of recent conflicts, highlighting the plight of those experiencing mental, marital and financial problems. The piece was created by Matt Durham, a 23-year old TA veteran of three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.