MORE THAN 200,000 AFGHANS HAVE LEFT PAKISTAN SINCE APRIL

Wed 04 June 2025:

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

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, according to the ministry.

Millions of Afghans have poured into Pakistan over the past several decades, fleeing successive wars. Hundreds of thousands have come since the return of the Taliban government in 2021.

But over one million Afghans have left Pakistan since Islamabad launched its repatriation program in 2023, the ministry added.

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.

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Human rights groups have raised concerns

Pakistan started the mass deportation of Afghan refugees in 2023.

Islamabad said the drive is part of a campaign aimed at clamping down on migrants who are in the country illegally.

About 845,000 Afghans have left Pakistan over the past 18 months, figures from the International Organization for Migration show. Pakistan says three million Afghans remain.

Afghans crossing the border have told French news agency AFP that they left their homes without taking all their belongings or money, with some rounded up and taken directly to the border.

“Pakistan is abandoning its international commitment to not send people back to where their rights are at risk,” Fereshta Abbasi of Afghanistan Human Rights Watch said.

Kabul has termed the repatriation as forced deportation. ”The mistreatment inflicted by neighboring countries is unacceptable and intolerable,” said the Taliban’s Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation wrote on X.

“All refugees should be able to take their money, belongings and property with them,” it added.

The Taliban government also accused Islamabad for using Afghan migrants for “political goals.”

Kabul, Islamabad row amid rising crackdown

Over the last three years, Pakistan’s relationship with neighboring Afghanistan has deteriorated. Islamabad holds the Taliban authorities in Afghanistan responsible for their inability to control the operations of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a militant group that formed in 2007 and has conducted numerous attacks on Pakistani security forces.

As cross-border tensions with the Taliban regime escalated, concerns were also raised about the well-being of Afghans in Pakistan amid reports of purported intimidation and arrests. The UN special rapporteur has expressed his worries, stating that Afghans in the area deserve more humane treatment.

Pakistan said it plans to accelerate the drive to repatriate millions of Afghans who crossed the border during decades of armed conflict in their home country and after the Taliban seized power in 2021.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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