INTERNAL DISPLACEMENT CRISIS LOOMS IN WAKE OF MILITANTS’ TAKEOVER

As Afghanistan’s neighbors, along with other countries in the region and in the West, brace for the possibility of a large-scale refugee crisis driven by the Taliban’s rapid return to national power, the largest share of the displacement crisis is unfolding within Afghanistan’s borders, aid groups say.

As the Taliban took territory in recent weeks, waves of displaced Afghans fled their home provinces on foot and in cars and rickshaws in search of shifting, shrinking government-controlled pockets. In the week before Kabul fell to the Islamist group, a surge of tens of thousands of people fled, many of them making their way to the capital, directly or by way of provincial capitals that did not hold out long.

“We are seeing largescale displacement in what is now a humanitarian emergency,” Christopher Boian, a senior communications officer for the United Nations high commissioner for Refugees, told The Post.

Afghanistan already had 3.5 million people internally displaced before the Taliban took over. More than a half-million Afghan civilians have been displaced this year, the UNHCR estimates. There were 126,000 new IDPS between July 7 and Aug. 9 alone — numbers that don’t take into account the days of swelling movement before Kabul’s Aug. 15 fall.

The displacement situation, Boian said, is “fluid,” “moving fast,” “somewhat unpredictable” — and “overwhelmingly happening” inside Afghanistan itself. Of the 550,000 displaced people this year, about 80 percent are women and girls, he said.

Now that the Taliban has control at the national level, and there are few places to flee them within the country, it remains to be seen what share of people will simply go home.

“They, like many of us, thought that Kabul would be held by the government for some period of time and they saw it as a safe location to run to. That proved not to be the case,” Bob Kitchen, vice president of emergencies and humanitarian action at the International Rescue Committee, told The Post on Thursday.

While Kitchen said his organization is not seeing a large-scale return from Kabul, he doesn’t know how long that will last. His sense is that people are still in Kabul with some hope that they can get out of the country.

The Taliban has restricted access to the airport, where scenes of chaos continued into the weekend, with only a trickle of Afghans managing to make their way out.