Pakistan issues fresh call for Afghans to leave

QUETTA: Pakistan issued a new call on Friday for Afghans living in the southwest to leave the country, triggering thousands to rush to the border, officials said.

Millions of Afghans have poured into Pakistan over the past several decades, fleeing successive wars, as well as hundreds of thousands who arrived after the return of the Taliban government in 2021.

A deportation drive first launched in 2023 was renewed in April when Pakistan’s government rescinded hundreds of thousands of residence permits for Afghans, threatening to arrest anyone who did not leave.

“We have received directives from the home department to launch a fresh drive to repatriate all Afghans... in a respectful and orderly manner,” Mehar Ullah, a senior government official in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province, told AFP.

The province borders Afghanistan and there are significant ties between the regions. On Friday, there were “around 4,000 to 5,000 people at the Chaman border” waiting to return, said Habib Bingalzai, a senior government official in Chaman. Abdul Latif Hakimi, the head of Refugee Registration in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province across the border, said they were aware of an increase in returning Afghans on Friday. In total, more than one million Afghans have left Pakistan since 2023, including more than 200,000 since April. The campaign launched in April targeted the more than 800,000 Afghans with temporary residence permits, some of whom were born in the country or have lived there for decades. Some Pakistanis have grown weary of hosting a large Afghan population as security and economic woes deepen, and the deportation drive has widespread support. Pakistan’s security forces are under enormous pressure along the border with Afghanistan, battling a growing insurgency by ethnic nationalists in Balochistan in the southwest, and the Pakistani Taliban and its affiliates in the northwest.

Last year, Pakistan recorded the highest number of deaths from attacks in a decade and the government frequently accuses Afghan nationals of taking part in attacks. Iran has also launched a large-scale deportation campaign of Afghans, which has seen more than 1.5 million sent back across the border.