TORKHAM: More than 100,000 Afghans have left Pakistan in the past three weeks, the interior ministry said Tuesday, after Islamabad announced the widespread cancelation 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 neighboring Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities, which Islamabad blames for fueling a rise in border attacks.
The interior ministry told AFP 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 AFP 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 neighbor 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 AFP 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 canceled 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 AFP on the condition of anonymity.
“Who will do that after they’re gone?“
Islamabad says more than 100,000 Afghans left Pakistan in April
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Islamabad says more than 100,000 Afghans left Pakistan in April
- More than 100,000 Afghans have left Pakistan in the past three weeks, the interior ministry said Tuesday
Russia says captured Ukraine’s Siversk in key eastern region
- The Russian army in Ukraine is “confidently advancing along the entire front,” Putin said
- He said last month his troops were advancing on Siversk, home to around 11,000 residents
MOSCOW: Russia said Thursday its troops had seized full control of Siversk, a Ukrainian city in the eastern Donetsk region where fighting has intensified in recent weeks, though Ukraine denied the key settlement had been lost.
The Russian army has been slowly but steadily grinding through eastern Ukraine and taking ground from outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian forces, with some of the fiercest battles taking place in Donetsk.
Russia’s military chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, said Moscow’s forces had captured Siversk in a report to President Vladimir Putin during a televised meeting with army commanders.
The Russian army in Ukraine is “confidently advancing along the entire front,” Putin said, thanking the commanders and soldiers “for their combat work.”
Putin said last month his troops were advancing on Siversk, home to around 11,000 residents before the war, claiming that the Russian offensive was “practically impossible to hold back.”
The Ukrainian army’s eastern command denied Russian claims it had taken Siversk, saying that it “remains under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
“The enemy is trying to infiltrate Siversk in small groups, taking advantage of unfavorable weather conditions but most of these units are being destroyed on the approaches,” it added in a Facebook post.
Siversk is located about 30 kilometers (18 miles) east of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last two major cities still under Ukrainian control in the Donbas — an industrial and mining region in Moscow’s sights.
Moscow earlier this month said it had captured Pokrovsk, a former road and rail hub also in Donetsk, but Kyiv claims fighting in the city is still ongoing.
Putin has said that Moscow is ready to fight on to seize the rest of the land it claims in eastern Ukraine if Kyiv does not give it up as part of a peace deal.
Eastern Ukraine has been ravaged since Russia launched its assault in February 2022, with tens of thousands of people killed and millions forced to flee their homes.
