According to the UN refugee organization (UNHCR) This year already returned more than 1.2 million Afghans (forced) from Pakistan and Iran to a country led by the Taliban. In a statement, an employee, Arafat Jamal of UNHCR describes “hungry and exhausted” Afghan families at the border of Iran and Afghanistan who “afraid of what awaits them in a country that many have never entered.”
According to the UN, the large -scale return can further destabilize the fragile situation in the country. “The UN estimates that more than half of the Afghan population depends on humanitarian aid,” the organization writes. Afghanistan is in a humanitarian crisis, which was exacerbated by the takeover of the Taliban three years ago. “People live alone from bread and tea,” said the director of the World Food Program in January to Reuters. At the beginning of this year cut The United States millions on development aid, also to organizations such as the UN. “The UNHCR warns that the declining international support will only make the complex, overlapping crises in Afghanistan worse,” the organization said. “The UNHCR assistance to Afghanistan has only been funded for 23 percent this year.”
Aggressive migration policy
The fact that so many Afghans are going back this year has everything to do with an more aggressive migration policy from both Pakistan and Iran. In 2023, both countries launched individual campaigns to set out foreigners who, they say they are illegally staying in their countries. The countries established returns and threatened with deportations.
The Iranian attorney general, Mohammad Movahedi Azad, said again on Saturday that foreigners should leave the country quickly. AP news agency reports this on the basis of Iranian state media. “Foreigners, especially brothers and sisters from Afghanistan, who we have been living for years, help us so that illegal people can leave Iran as quickly as possible,” said Azad. According to Iranian authorities, more than six million Afghans stayed in the country in April, 2.5 million of whom were illegal.
This year, around 640,000 people with an Afghan descent, more than half of whom were forced. That number has been increasing since mid -June daily: Thursday 36,100 Afghans returned in one day, the UNHCR counted. The border crossings to Afghanistan turned into a sea of people, including women and children who ‘mainly worry, because they are afraid of the restrictions in the field of freedom of movement and fundamental rights such as education and employment, ”said UN employee Jamal in UNHCR.
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