They are now arriving in trucks and buses at the border posts in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Afghans who have to leave Pakistan. There are entire families, including children, who were already born in Pakistan. The deadline for all illegal refugees and migrants to voluntarily leave the country expired on November 1st. This affects around 1.7 million Afghans who have fled over the past four decades, first from the Soviet invasion and then from the Taliban.
According to the Taliban government in Afghanistan, 60,000 Afghans returned from Pakistan between September 23rd and October 22nd. State television in Pakistan has been showing the countdown to November 1st for weeks. The government has set up deportation centers where migrants are held until they are returned. Interior Minister Sarfraz Bugti denied on Monday that this repatriation operation was directed against the Afghans. “The impression that only people are being deported from Afghanistan is wrong,” he said at a press conference. But he also said: “Most people without papers come from Afghanistan.”
Up to four million Afghans are in the neighboring country
Pakistan is home to more than four million Afghan refugees, and between 600,000 and 800,000 have immigrated since the Taliban last came to power in 2021 alone. Now the government in Islamabad is using “threats, abuse and detention to force Afghan asylum seekers without legal status to return to Afghanistan or be deported,” the human rights organization Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
The harsh deportation is primarily a response to the increasing number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan. “There have been 24 suicide attacks since January this year, 14 of which were carried out by Afghan nationals,” Interior Minister Bugti said on October 3 when he announced the repatriation plan. In total, more than 300 attacks have been reported in Pakistan this year, primarily in the provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, which border Afghanistan. Where the Pashtuns are at home, some of whom are Afghans and some of whom are Pakistanis. From which the Taliban of both countries are also recruited. Islamabad also blames them for smuggling and extortion.
The problem for the vast majority of other Afghans: They no longer have anything in their old homeland. They had to leave everything behind when they fled. And the economic and social situation has deteriorated dramatically since then. Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, foreign ministry spokeswoman in Islamabad, wrote in a statement: “Our record over the past 40 years in welcoming millions of our Afghan brothers and sisters speaks for itself.”
Exodus by bus and truck: As here in Peshawar, the columns of those who have to return to Afghanistan are building up.
(Photo: Umar Qayyum/IMAGO/Xinhua)
No country has taken in more refugees from Afghanistan than Pakistan, including local workers who actually want to go on to Germany. 3,000 of them are still stuck in Pakistan, but “the processes with the German authorities are taking so long that their Pakistani visas are expiring – and since November 1st they can theoretically be deported to Afghanistan, where they have to fear for their lives,” says Eva Beyer, who runs a safe house for the “Kabul Airlift” organization in Islamabad. Actual departures last year: 18.
The government in Islamabad points out that it is struggling with record inflation and a strict rescue program from the International Monetary Fund – and that illegal migrants have been consuming resources for decades. The refugee agency UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration, however, warn that Pakistan’s plans would lead to “serious protection risks” for women and girls who are forced to leave the country.