Afghans forced to leave hostile Pakistan

(Torkham, Afghanistan) The grandfather had always feared that this day would come.

In the 40 years since he fled Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, this man, Najmuddin Torjan, has lived illegally in Pakistan. He got married there, had children and saw them have children of their own. All the while, he felt the uneasiness of a life on borrowed land, seemingly on borrowed time.

This month the deadline expired. The Pakistani government abruptly declared that all foreign citizens living in the country without documents must leave by 1^er november. Fearing arrest or imprisonment, her family packed everything: their clothes, their pots, their pans. The wooden beams of the ceiling. The metal window frames and rusty doors.

After dismantling the place they had called home for three generations, the family members boarded a truck and joined a stream of Afghan migrants heading to the border.

“I did my best during these 40 years to build a life for myself,” Mr. Torjan, 63, said, the truck parked behind him at the border.

Mr. Torjan is one of around 70,000 Afghans who have returned from Pakistan in recent weeks, according to Pakistani authorities. The expulsion order, which is widely seen as targeting Afghan migrants, is seen as a sign of growing hostility between the Pakistani government and Taliban authorities in Afghanistan over militants operating in both countries.

In recent weeks, the 1.7 million Afghans living illegally in Pakistan have come under increasing pressure to leave, according to human rights groups and migrants. Landlords have suddenly evicted Afghan tenants, fearing they would have to pay hefty fines if they did not do so. Employers fired Afghan workers. Police raided neighborhoods popular with Afghans, arresting those who did not have papers.

Concerns

Rights groups have condemned Pakistan’s actions, concerned that some Afghans could be persecuted in Afghanistan because of their past ties to opponents of the Taliban.

Pakistani authorities, however, have reaffirmed their policy, recently declaring that there would be no extension of the deadline. They have established several deportation centers across the country, showing that the government is serious about detaining and repatriating Afghans.

“After the 1^er November, no compromise will be made regarding illegal immigrants,” Sarfraz Bugti, the country’s caretaker interior minister, said at a press conference in Islamabad on Thursday.

As the deadline approached, many Afghans faced a dire decision: try to stay in a country where they are no longer welcome or return to a country where they have not lived in decades.

Those who chose to return have flooded border crossings in recent weeks, overwhelming authorities and aid groups. Around 4,000 people are repatriated every day, 10 times more than before the expulsion policy was announced, according to humanitarian organizations.

At the Torkham crossing in Nangarhar province, a mountainous region along the Afghan-Pakistani border, trucks loaded with decades of personal belongings cross the border every day, their engines running out of steam. . Families, often hungry and tired, lie in makeshift tents waiting to be registered by aid groups offering small stipends. Some wait for hours, others for days.

Towards Afghanistan… and the unknown

At a transit center run by the International Organization for Migration, a young girl named Sapna sits in the shade of an orange tarp. Like many other young people, Sapna, 15, was born in Pakistan to Afghan parents. Today, she sets foot on Afghan soil for the first time.

While she was growing up in Pakistan, her parents talked about the Afghanistan they remembered: the snow that covers the capital, Kabul, in winter. The lush mountains of the Hindu Kush. The huge, bright blue lakes in the central valleys.

When her father announced this month that the family would return, she initially felt like she was going on an adventure. The country is at peace, he told her, and the women wear the same covering hijabs that Sapna wears in Pakistan.

As they set out for the border, she and her 9-year-old brother painted the old Afghan flag, with its colors of red, green and black, on the backs of their hands and sang songs throughout the journey. She tried to forget her friends’ warnings about the Afghanistan she was heading to and the Taliban’s restrictions on women.

As she passed the border fence, she saw the white Taliban flag. A feeling of uneasiness came over her. She hid the flag on the back of her hand.

“The old flag was beautiful,” she said. Then she whispered, “I can’t say anything negative about the white flag anymore. »

Taliban officials said they have set up a high commission to provide basic services to returning Afghans and plan to establish temporary camps to house them. However, many returning Afghans find these measures of little comfort. They include some of the nearly 600,000 people who have fled over the past two years after the Taliban took power, including journalists, activists and former police officers, soldiers and civil servants who worked for the Taliban-backed government. UNITED STATES.

“Fear every day”

For Abdul Rahman Hussaini, 56, returning to Afghanistan is like entering enemy territory. When the Taliban took power, his former employers at a foreign nongovernmental organization advised him to seek asylum in the United States under a program for Afghans who had worked for organizations funded by the UNITED STATES. This program required applicants to be outside of Afghanistan.

He and the eleven family members who accompanied him to Pakistan stayed after their three-month visas expired, still waiting for a response from the program. “We lived in fear every day; it was like we were in a prison,” he said.

Then news of the expulsion policy broke. His landlord kicked him out, and two weeks later the police knocked on the door of a friend’s house where his family had moved.

Back in his country, he is overwhelmed by anxiety. He fears he will no longer be able to benefit from American asylum. He fears reprisals from the Taliban for his previous work. He has no idea how he will be able to provide for his family.

“Every moment my feeling of fear increases,” he said.

This article was originally published in the New York Times.