PESHAWAR: The first batches of nearly a million civilians ordered to leave their homes ahead of an anti-Taliban offensive in North Waziristan on the Afghanistan border in 2014 started returning home this week, with 30 families crossing the border on Friday and more expected to enter Pakistan today, Saturday, a senior official in North Waziristan district said.

Pakistan announced the start of a full-on military offensive in North Waziristan in 2014 to quash an increasingly assertive Pakistani Taliban insurgency in the ethnic Pashtun region, the base of some of the country’s most feared Al-Qaeda-linked militants.

As troops encircled the mountainous region on the Afghan border and fighter jets pounded villages and militant hideouts, a wave of panicked people spilled into the nearby region of Bannu, as well as Afghanistan.

On Friday, Shahid Ali Khan, the top district administrator in North Waziristan, told a group of journalists at the Ghulam Khan border crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan that a small batch of 30 families had crossed the border and arrived in Miranshah on Friday.

Khan said more families would arrive today, Saturday, and the process would continue, though he did not provide a timeframe for all families to be repatriated, saying that the process involved lengthy verifications to ensure Afghans did not enter Pakistan. 

“We have 5,083 [Pakistani] families registered with us who are in Afghanistan,” Ihsan Dawar at the Provincial Disaster Management Authority told Arab News. “We don’t have any exact timeline as to when their repatriation will be completed but a process has been set in motion, which will be expedited with the passage of time.”

Dawar said the families who returned on Friday were offered food and given Rs8,000 at the border where they were welcomed by provincial authorities and other civil and military officials.

Khan said the returning families would be temporarily placed in adjacent districts to North Waziristan but would be sent back to their respective villages after the verification process was completed.

Several Pakistani families have also returned from Afghanistan on their own in the last few years since then minister for frontier regions Abdul Qadir Baloch said in 2015 that the tribal regions were safe for people to return. 

Malik Abdullah Noor, an elder from North Waziristan who still resides in a refugee camp in Afghanistan’s Khost province, told Arab News in a phone interview he had held several meetings with officials over the last many years in which he pleaded with Pakistani authorities to facilitate people in returning home. 

Estimating that a total of 12,000 tribal families were living in different parts of Afghanistan, he said. “It looked like an Eid festival when I told children in our refugee camp in Khost that we were going back to Miranshah.”