Islamabad:
More than 100,000 Afghans have left Pakistan for the past three weeks, the Ministry of the Interior said Tuesday, after Islamabad announced the widespread cancellation of residence permits.
The drive is part of a major campaign that the government began in 2023 with repatriating all illegal foreigners. During the first phase, all undocumented Afghans were deported, those who did not have identity certificates.
Analysts say the expulsions are designed to push neighboring Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities acclaimed by Islamabad of causing an increase in border attacks.
The Ministry of the Interior told AFP that “100,529 Afghans are back in April”.
Convoys for Afghan families are on their way to the border since the beginning of April, when the deadline to leave the outlet and crossed into a country tied in a humanitarian crisis.
“I was born in Pakistan and have never been to Afghanistan,” 27-year-old Allah Rahman told AFP at the Torkham border on Saturday.
“I was afraid the police could humiliate me and my family. Now we’re on our way back to Afghanistan out of pure helplessness.”
Afghanistan’s Prime Minister Hasan Akhund on Saturday sentenced the “unilateral measures” taken by his neighbor after Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to Kabul for a day -long visit to discuss the return.
Akhund called on the Pakistani government to “facilitate the worthy return of Afghan refugees”.
Many people are voluntarily leaving and choosing to deviate instead of being exposed to deportation, but the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR said that in April alone, more arrests and detentions in Pakistan – 12,948 – than throughout last year.
Pakistan’s security forces are under enormous pressure along the border with Afghanistan as they fight against a growing rebellion of terrorists in Balochistan in the southwest, and the Pakistani Taliban and its affiliated companies in northwestern.
Last year, the deadliest in Pakistan was for a decade.
The government has often said that Afghan citizens participate in attacks and accuses Kabul of having allowed terrorists to seek refuge on its land, denies a tax denied the Taliban leaders.
Millions of Afghans have been poured into Pakistan in the last decades that fled from successive wars, as well as hundreds of thousands since the Taliban government’s return in 2021.
Some Pakistanis have grown tired of hosting a large Afghan population as security and financial evil elaborated and the deportation campaign has broad support.
“They came here for refuge, but ended up taking jobs and opening businesses. They took jobs from Pakistanis who are already fighting,” 41-year-old hairdresser Tanveer Ahmad told AFP when he gave a customer a shave.
More than half of Afghans who were deported were children, UNHCR said Friday. The women and girls among those who crossed came into a country where they are banned from education beyond high school and blocked from many work sectors.
In the first return phase in 2023 hundreds of thousands of undocumented Afghans were forced over the border over a few weeks
