Over 100,000 Afghans left Pak in last 3 weeks: Ministry

More than 100,000 Afghans have left Pakistan in the past three weeks, the interior ministry said on Tuesday, after Islamabad announced the widespread cancellation of residence permits.

Calling Afghans “terrorists and criminals”, the Pakistan government launched its mass eviction campaign on April 1.

Analysts say the expulsions are designed to pressure neighbouring Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities, which Islamabad blames for fuelling a rise in border attacks.

The interior ministry told reporters that “100,529 Afghans have left in April”.

Convoys of Afghan families have been heading to the border since the start of April when the deadline to leave expired, crossing into a country mired in a humanitarian crisis.

“I was born in Pakistan and have never been to Afghanistan,” 27-year-old Allah Rahman told reporters at the Torkham border on Saturday.

“I was afraid the police might humiliate me and my family. Now we’re heading back to Afghanistan out of sheer helplessness.”

Afghanistan’s prime minister Hasan Akhund on Saturday condemned the “unilateral measures” taken by its neighbour after Pakistan’s foreign minister Ishaq Dar flew to Kabul for a day-long visit to discuss the returns.

Akhund urged the Pakistani government to “facilitate the dignified return of Afghan refugees”.

Afghans in Pakistan have reported weeks of arbitrary arrests, extortion and harassment by authorities, with many of those forcibly returned living in Sindh and Punjab provinces.

Many people are leaving voluntarily, choosing to depart instead of face deportation, but the UN refugee agency UNHCR said that in April alone, more arrests and detentions took place in Pakistan — 12,948 — than in all of last year.

Pakistan’s security forces are under enormous pressure along the border with Afghanistan as they battle a growing insurgency by ethnic nationalists in Balochistan in the southwest, and the Pakistani Taliban and its affiliates in the northwest.

Last year was the deadliest in Pakistan in a decade.

The government frequently accuses Afghan nationals of taking part in attacks and blames Kabul for allowing militants to take refuge on its soil, a charge Taliban leaders deny.

Millions of Afghans have poured into Pakistan over the past several decades fleeing successive wars, as well as hundreds of thousands since the return of the Taliban government in 2021.

Some Pakistanis have grown weary of hosting a large Afghan population as security and economic woes deepen, and the deportation campaign has widespread support.

“They came here for refuge but ended up taking jobs, opening businesses. They took jobs from Pakistanis who are already struggling,” 41-year-old hairdresser Tanveer Ahmad told reporters as he gave a customer a shave.

More than half of Afghans being deported were children, the UNHCR said on Friday.

The women and girls among those crossing were entering a country where they are banned from education beyond secondary school and barred from many sectors of work.

In the first phase of returns in 2023, hundreds of thousands of undocumented Afghans were forced across the border in the space of a few weeks.

In the second phase announced in March, the Pakistan government cancelled the residence permits of more than 800,000 Afghans and warned thousands more awaiting relocation to other countries to leave by the end of April.

“Afghans take on jobs Pakistanis consider shameful, like collecting garbage,” a shopkeeper told reporters on the condition of anonymity.

“Who will do that after they’re gone?”

Pushed out of Pakistan where she was born, Nazmine Khan’s first experience of her country, Afghanistan, was in a sweltering tent at a border camp.

“We never thought we would return to Afghanistan,” said the 15-year-old girl, who has little idea of what will become of her or her family, only that she is likely to have fewer freedoms.

“When our parents told us we had to leave, we cried,” added Khan.

Having nowhere to go in Afghanistan, she and six other family members shared a stifling tent in the Omari camp near the Torkham border point.

Agence France-Presse