Over 1 Million Afghan Refugees Return Home

Afghan refugees and migrants have been returning home all year, but their number swelled in recent months as……

VOA – In the largest influx of refugees returning to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2011, more than 1 million Afghans have returned home — one-fifth of them involuntarily — from neighboring Pakistan and Iran this year, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.

While more than 390,000 Afghan refugees voluntarily returned under a United Nations repatriation initiative, nearly 620,000 undocumented Afghans came from Pakistan and Iran, and more than 6,000 rejected asylum seekers returned from Europe. Nearly one-fifth of the returnees were deported, mostly by Iran.

Afghan refugees and migrants have been returning home all year, but their number swelled in recent months as authorities in Pakistan and Iran stepped up a campaign of harassment and deportation of millions of undocumented Afghan refugees while the U.N. and the government of Afghanistan enticed Afghan exiles with cash grants and offers of land.

As recently as last week, IOM and U.N. data indicated a little over 800,000 Afghan refugees had returned to Afghanistan through early November, but on Wednesday an IOM spokesman in Kabul said that figure has now topped 1 million.

“This is the highest level since 2002,” said Matthew Graydon, a spokesman for IOM’s Afghanistan office.

In 2002, nearly 2 million Afghan refugees, encouraged by the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, returned home from Pakistan and Iran where many had lived for two decades. Nearly 4 million others followed over the course of the next 12 years.

As security deteriorated last year, more than 200,000 Afghans fled the country, mostly to head to Europe, marking the largest post-Taliban mass migration out of the country.

While many Afghans continue to leave the country, the returnees are coming home at a time when fighting between the Taliban and government forces has internally displaced more than 1 million Afghans this year. With no signs of a letup in the flow of returning refugees, migration advocates are warning about a growing humanitarian crisis.