Since Pakistan’s government ordered 1.7 million individuals to leave or risk arrest and deportation, more than 165,000 Afghans have fled the country, according to officials on Thursday.
Most of them hurried to the border in the last few days as the deadline of November 1 drew near and authorities started to set up dozens of holding centers to house detained Afghans.
The magnitude of the migration has overwhelmed Afghan authorities, who are struggling to deal with the people who are returning, some of whom are visiting Afghanistan for the first time in their lives.
“We are constantly in contact with them (Pakistani authorities) asking for more time. People must be allowed to return with dignity,” the Taliban government’s refugees minister Khalil Haqqani told AFP.
“They should not give Afghans a hard time, they should not make more enemies,” he said at a temporary processing centre, which opened overnight Wednesday.
Taliban authorities set up the centre several kilometres from a border crossing, as well as camps for families with nowhere to go, after a bottleneck there sparked an “emergency situation” for thousands of stranded people, an official said.
At the largest border crossing at Torkham in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, officials worked into the early hours of Thursday to clear a queue of 28,000 people that stretched for seven kilometres (four miles).
Just over 129,000 have fled from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the provincial home department said, while a total of 38,100 have crossed through Chaman in Balochistan province, border officials there told AFP.
