ISLAMABAD: More than 200,000 Afghans have left Pakistan since the government renewed a deportation drive in April, Islamabad’s interior ministry told AFP.

Pakistan has launched a strict campaign to evict more than 800,000 Afghans who have had their residence permits canceled, including some who were born in Pakistan or lived there for decades.

According to the ministry, more than 135,000 Afghans left Pakistan in April, while the number dropped to 67,000 in May and more than 3,000 were sent back in the first two days of June.

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

A campaign to evict them began in 2023, prompting hundreds of thousands to cross the border in the span of a few days, fearing harassment or arrest.

In total, more than one million Afghans have left Pakistan.

The UN’s International Organization for Migration on Tuesday voiced concern over a surge in Afghan families being deported from Iran, recording 15,675 crossing in May, a more than two-fold increase from the previous month.

The influx across both borders threatens to strain Afghanistan’s already “fragile reception and reintegration systems,” IOM said in a statement.

Islamabad has labelled Afghans “terrorists and criminals,” but analysts say the expulsions are designed to pressure neighboring Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities to control militancy in the border regions.

Last year, Pakistan recorded the highest number of deaths from attacks in a decade.

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

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.

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

Pakistan is now threatening to lift the protection granted to the 1.3 million Afghans holding refugee cards issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees at the end of June.