- Afghan families in convoys heading to border-crossings in Torkham and Chaman following expiry of Match 31 deadline
ISLAMABAD: The expatriation of illegal foreign nationals continued at a brisk pace and more than 100,000 Afghans have left Pakistan in the past three weeks, the interior ministry said on Tuesday.
The government has launched its mass deportation campaign from April 1 following the expiry of the March 31 deadline set for voluntary return of Afghan Citizen Card (ACC) holders.
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 said 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 the neighbouring country after 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”.
Many Afghan people are leaving voluntarily, choosing to depart instead of facing deportation, but the UN refugee agency, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said that in April alone, more arrests and detentions took place in Pakistan — 12,948 — than in all of last year.
Children deported
Last year was the deadliest in the country 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 the country 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 the 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.
