More than 100,000 Afghan have left Pakistan in the last three weeks, the Interior Ministry said Tuesday, after Islamabad announced the generalized cancellation of residence permits, he reported AFP
Pakistan has recently witnessed hundreds of Afghans dragging their belongings through the borders of Torkham and Chaman when the government began its second impulse of deportations on March 31, which addressed those who owned Afghan citizen cards, an identity document issued jointly by the Pakistani and Afghan governments in 2017.
The impulse is part of a larger campaign that the government began in 2023 to repatriate all illegal foreigners. Under the first phase, all undocumented Afghans were deported, those who had no identity proof.
Analysts say that expulsions are designed to press the Taliban authorities of Afghanistan neighboring, which Islamabad blames to feed an increase in border attacks.
The Ministry of Interior said AFP that “100,529 Afghan have left in April.”
The convoys of Afghan families have addressed the border since the beginning of April, when the deadline to go expired, crossing a country plunged into a humanitarian crisis.
“I was born in Pakistan and I have never been in Afghanistan,” said Allah Rahman, 27 years old AFP On Torkham’s border on Saturday.
“I was afraid that the police could humiliate me and my family. Now we headed back to Afghanistan for pure helplessness.”
The Prime Minister of Afghanistan, Hasan Akhund, condemned on Saturday the “unilateral measures” taken by his neighbor after Pakistan Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, flew to Kabul for a one -day visit to discuss the returns.
Akhund urged the Pakistani government to “facilitate the dignified return of Afghan refugees.”
Many Afghan voluntarily, choosing to leave instead of facing deportation, but the UNCN of the UN refugee agency said only in April, there were more arrests and arrests in Pakistan, 12,948, than in the last year.
Deported children
Pakistan’s security forces are under huge pressure along the border with Afghanistan while fighting a growing insurgency on the part of ethnic nationalists in Baluchistan and Pakistani Talibanos and their affiliates in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Last year he was the deadliest in Pakistan in a decade.
The government has often said that Afghan citizens participate in the attacks and blame Kabul for allowing militants to take refuge in their soil, a position of the Taliban leaders deny.
Millions of Afghan have become Pakistan in the last decades fleeing successive wars, as well as hundreds of thousands from the return of the Taliban government in 2021.
Some Pakistanis have tired of organizing a large Afghan population as security and economic problems deepen, and the deportation campaign has broad support.
“They came here for refuge, but ended up taking jobs, opening business. They took pachystani jobs who are already fighting,” said 41 -year -old hairdresser Tanveer Ahmad. AFP While he gave a client a shaving.
More than half of the Afghan deported were children, UNHCR said on Friday.
Women and girls among those who cross were entering a country where they are prohibited from education beyond high school and prohibited from many work sectors.
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 that they expected the relocation to other countries to be at the end of April.
“Afghas take pakistanis jobs consider shameful, how to collect garbage,” said a merchant AFP under condition of anonymity. “Who will do that after they have gone?”
