by Abubakar Siddique 2 December 2023
The Key Issue
A new survey has found that around 90 percent of the more than 400,000 Afghans who have been forced from neighboring Pakistan in recent months are homeless.
The British charity Islamic Relief, which operates in Afghanistan, said in a report released on November 29 that one-third of the returnees face severe food shortages, while more than 60 percent are sick.
Islamabad has been deporting thousands of Afghans each day since the expiry of its November 1 deadline for some 1.7 million undocumented Afghan refugees and migrants to voluntarily leave the South Asian country.
Islamic Relief’s report, based on interviews with 315 returnees, also found that 92 percent lacked access to safe drinking water, while 71 percent had no access to sanitation.
Some 98 percent of returnees were worried about the safety of their family members, while 90 percent were concerned about their children’s access to education.
“Many of these people are returning to Afghanistan with nothing, just as a freezing winter approaches,” said Manzoor Ahmed, Islamic Relief’s acting country director in Afghanistan. “They don’t have a place to stay, they don’t have food or health care, they are sick and impoverished.”
Why It’s Important: Afghans are returning to a country grappling with the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
The hundreds of thousands of new returnees are adding to the more than 29 million Afghans — out of a total population of around 40 million — who need humanitarian assistance, according to the United Nations.
The cash-strapped Taliban government, which remains unrecognized and sanctioned by the international community, appears unable to absorb the returning refugees or address the humanitarian needs of Afghans.
Aid agencies operating in Afghanistan have called for more international funding to address the needs of the returnees, who lack shelter, warm clothes, and food.
“They are forced to return to Afghanistan at the worst possible time,” said Hsiao-Wei Lee, the country director for the World Food Program, on November 26. “We need to help them not only get through this winter but also help them rebuild their lives here.”
What’s Next: Many of the new Afghan returnees face a grim future.
The Taliban has established temporary camps for the returnees near the border with Pakistan, and promised to assist them. But many returnees complain of a lack of tents, food, water, and sanitation.
“Everyone I know doesn’t have housing and is facing many other problems,” Abdullah, who recently returned to the southern Afghan province of Zabul from Pakistan, told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi. “It is impossible to live in tents because of the winter.”
What To Keep An Eye On
Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai is under fire for suggesting that the international community should not seek to forcibly remove the Taliban from power.
“We don’t want a collapse of the regime or split of the regime. We have had enough of that in Afghanistan,” the 65-year-old told Kyodo News, a Japanese news agency, in an interview published on November 28.
Karzai, who lives in Kabul, suggested that dialogue with the extremist group could bring about changes to its controversial policies, including its severe restrictions on women’s rights.
But some rights activists criticized Karzai’s call for engagement with a group that has shown few signs of reversing its draconian policies.
“Since the Taliban returned to power, being a woman has become a crime,” Azita Nazimi, a women’s rights activist, told Radio Azadi. “All of what we have is the result of Karzai’s past support for the Taliban.”
When in power from 2001 to 2014, Karzai called for a negotiated end to the war between the Western-backed Afghan government and the Taliban.
Why It’s Important: Reconciliation among Afghans has long been touted as the best solution to end the more than four decades of war in Afghanistan.
But the Taliban has refused to share power with other Afghans and used force to impose its fundamentalist version of Islam on the population.
During intra-Afghan negotiations prior to the Taliban’s forcible takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, the extremist group rejected a power-sharing agreement with rival Afghans.