Thousands of Afghans pour out of a hostile Pakistan

Amid looming deadline, fears rise of fines, jail

TORKHAM, Afghanistan — The grandfather always feared this day would come.

In the four decades since he fled Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, the man, Najmuddin Torjan, had been living illegally in Pakistan. He married there, had children, and watched as they had children of their own. All the while, he felt the unease of making a life on borrowed land, seemingly on borrowed time.

This month, that time ran out. The Pakistani government abruptly declared that all foreign citizens living in the country without documents must leave by Nov. 1. Fearing arrest or prison, his family packed up everything: their clothes, their pots, their pans. The wooden beams from their ceiling. Their metal window frames and rusted doors.

After dismantling the place they had called home for three generations, they boarded a truck and joined a flood of Afghan migrants bound for the border.

“I tried my best in these 40 years to build a life,” said Torjan, 63, the truck parked behind him at the border. “It’s difficult. Now I’m starting again from zero.”

Torjan is one of more than 70,000 Afghans who have returned from Pakistan in recent weeks, according to Pakistani authorities. The deportation order, which is largely seen as targeting Afghan migrants, is considered a sign of the increasing hostility between Pakistan’s government and Taliban authorities in Afghanistan over militants operating in both countries.

In recent weeks, the 1.7 million Afghans living illegally in Pakistan have come under mounting pressure to leave, according to human rights groups and migrants. Landlords have suddenly evicted Afghan tenants, fearing large fines if they don’t. Employers have fired Afghan workers. The police have raided neighborhoods popular among Afghans, arresting those without paperwork.

Rights groups have condemned Pakistan’s actions, worried about the possibility that some Afghans could face persecution in Afghanistan for past ties to Taliban opponents.

But Pakistani officials have doubled down on the policy, declaring recently that there would be no extension of the deadline. They have established several deportation centers nationwide, signaling the government’s seriousness about detaining and repatriating Afghans.

“After Nov. 1, no compromise will be made over illegally staying immigrants,” Sarfraz Bugti, the country’s caretaker interior minister, said Thursday at a news conference in Islamabad. “Those leaving the country voluntarily would have lesser difficulties than those nabbed by the state.”

With the deadline approaching, many Afghans have faced devastating decisions about whether to try to stay in a country where they are no longer welcome or to return to one where they have not lived for decades.

Those who have opted to return have flooded border crossings in recent weeks, overwhelming the authorities and aid groups. About 4,000 people are repatriating every day, more than 10 times the number before the deportation policy was announced, according to aid groups.

At the Torkham crossing in Nangarhar province, a mountainous piece of land along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, trucks piled high with decades worth of belongings trundle across the border each day, their engines straining. Families, many hungry and tired, lie under makeshift tents as they wait to be registered by aid groups offering small stipends. Some wait for hours; others days.

At a transit center run by the International Organization for Migration, a girl named Sapna sat under the shade of an orange tarp. Like many other young people there, Sapna, 15, was born in Pakistan to Afghan parents. Now she was setting foot on Afghan soil for the first time.

Taliban officials have said they have established a high commission to provide basic services to returning Afghans and plan to set up temporary camps to house them.

Still many returning Afghans say that offers little solace. Among them are some of the roughly 600,000 people who fled in the past two years after the Taliban seized power, including journalists, activists, former police officers, soldiers, and officials who worked for the US-backed government.