When the United States and other NATO nations left Afghanistan as the Taliban seized control in August 2021, hundreds of thousands of Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan. Almost three years later, many still remain, trapped in resettlement limbo – including roughly 20,000 Afghans awaiting promised visas to the United States. Now, these Afghans face the … Read more
The unrelenting season of forced homecoming continues for Afghans who had sought refuge in neighboring countries in the past. Thousands of Afghan refugees have been forcefully relocated from countries like Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Tajikistan, back into Afghanistan. In a country where the current set of rulers has had little to offer other than regressive … Read more
“Every refugee is a symptom of our collective failure to ensure peace and security,” Filippo Grandi, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, wrote recently in the Guardian. This often-overlooked fact underpins the plight of 114 million people who have been displaced across the world. Of this total, there are 36.4 million refugees scattered worldwide. Although … Read more
Along the 582-mile Iran-Afghanistan border, there are at least three legal border crossings and several unmonitored points of ingress and egress. Since the August 2021 seizure of power by the Taliban, these crossings have been used by millions of Afghans to exit into Iran. While most of these journeys have been to avoid persecution at … Read more
Advertisement Large numbers of Afghans crammed into trucks and buses in Pakistan on Tuesday, heading to the border to return home ahead of the expiration of a Pakistani government deadline for those who are in the country illegally to leave or face deportation. The deadline is part of a new anti-migrant crackdown that targets all … Read more
Advertisement In the Chinese city of Nyingchi in Tibet, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Jalil Abbas Jilani met his Afghan counterpart Amir Khan Muttaqi on October 5. They were both attending the 3rd Trans-Himalaya Forum for International Cooperation hosted by China. Bilateral relations and trade between Afghanistan and Pakistan were supposed to be the core of the … Read more
Advertisement Ashok Ullah sold all his family’s belongings to be able to afford the journey to Torkham border. The 35-year-old from Jalalabad city in Afghanistan is one of the hundreds of thousands “unauthorized” Afghan refugees who have been asked to leave Pakistan or face mass arrests and deportations. “The police started harassing us recently and … Read more
An Afghan refugee family return to Afghanistan through Pakistan’s border crossing, Torkham, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, on March 11, 2015. Credit: AP Photo/Rahmat Gul, File Advertisement Pakistan has ordered millions of illegal immigrants living in the country to leave by October 30. The decision has raised concerns about the fate of around 1.7 million undocumented … Read more