Countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan Source: Afghanistan Analysts Network Nur Khan HimmatThe Pakistani government officially began implementing the second phase of its Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan on 1 April 2025 by targeting undocumented Afghans and those holding Afghan Citizen Cards (ACC). To date, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), since 15 September 2023, when Pakistan launched the plan, over 1 million Afghans have returned to Afghanistan. Around 84,200 of them were deported. UN agencies, Amnesty International, Pakistani political opposition figures and local businessmen have all criticised the move, but Islamabad has turned a deaf ear to their concerns. There are reports that even Proof of Registration Card (PoR) holders, who are officially recognised as refugees, have been arrested and deported to Afghanistan. AAN’s Nur Khan Himmat interviewed four Afghans about their experience of ‘returning home’.We interviewed four returnees,[1] two originally from Kunduz province, one from Kandahar and one with family origins in Faryab who was born in Pakistan.[2] All were men with families and businesses in Pakistan and had lived there for decades. They moved back to Afghanistan at the peak of the second phase of the implementation of the Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan, which began on 1 April 2025. The first phase began in October 2023, as AAN reported previously.The four intervieweesAbdul Halim, a father-of-nine from Dasht-e Archi district in Kunduz province, returned to Afghanistan on 7 April 2025 from Karachi, the capital of Sindh province. He had been a scrap dealer in Karachi. He first left Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion and spent 15 years in Balochistan province with his family, returning during the first Emirate for about eight years. When it collapsed, he left again for Pakistan. Halim was married in Pakistan and seven of his children were born there, with the other two born in Afghanistan during his first return.Shukrullah, the head of a household of 13, is also from Dasht-e Archi district in Kunduz province. He fled Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion and returned on 15 April after 40 years in exile. In Pakistan, he had been buying and selling second-hand appliances. Both he and his brother got married in Rawalpindi district of Punjab province and travelled back together, along with their wives and children.Akhtar Muhammad, a father-of-nine from Qaisar district in Faryab province, travelled to Afghanistan on 12 April from Karachi. His parents had migrated to Pakistan during the Soviet invasion and spent 42 years in Pakistan. He was born and got married there. His elder son also got married in Pakistan and lives with him in his household.Naik Muhammad, a father-of-five, is originally from Ghurak district in Kandahar. He returned to Afghanistan on 20 April from Quetta, after more than three decades in Pakistan. He had gone into exile during the civil war. He was married in Pakistan and all his children were born there. He had a grocery shop in Loralai district in Balochistan.None of the four men chose to return to Afghanistan and all have had difficult arrivals.Abdul Halim from Kunduz did not leave Pakistan voluntarily. Every day, he said, the Pakistani police were raiding the homes of Afghans in his neighbourhood. They also took his underage sons into custody. He was heartbroken when he was forced to leave Pakistan without the boys, but went because he feared the police would detain him alongside his female family members and they would be deported in a humiliating manner.The Pakistani police didn’t come to my house, but I was afraid they would raid us. They raided our neighbours, taking all the family members, and deported them. The police also arrested two of my sons, who are 14 and 12 years old. They were still in police detention when we travelled back to Afghanistan. I came back with the rest of the family, all but my eldest son who I told to stay at our relatives’ home and not to go outside until his brothers were freed. I asked him to bring them home once they were released. He called me yesterday to say he’d received his detained brothers. They’ll now join us in Afghanistan.Our second interviewee, Shukrullah, returned from the Rawalpindi district of Punjab province, also left under pressure and fear of arrest. “Although we weren’t deported, we couldn’t leave our house because we feared arrest by the police – so we decided to come back.” Akhtar Muhammad and Naik Muhammad were both deported.Akhtar described how, first, his son was arrested and taken to an unknown place, and then, a week later, the family home was raided and they were all taken to a Refugees Holding Centre. “But just as we were about to be taken from our home,” he said, “[my son] arrived back. I was very sad that our family was being deported, but when I saw him, I felt a surge of happiness. I’d been acutely worried, his mother as well.”We also spoke to another Afghan who did not want to be named. He lived in Kila Saifullah district in Balochistan and told AAN that the police had started arresting ACC card holders there on the fourth day of Eid ul-Fitr [3 April]. He had himself witnessed the police arresting Afghans to deport them and also shared with AAN a WhatsApp video of Afghans being taken away in a vehicle by the police, along with a policeman chasing after an Afghan in the city trying to arrest him (see video here ).How did the deportations start?As of 31 March 2025, approximately three million Afghans were residing in Pakistan. They are categorised into three groups based on their registration status: those recognised officially as refugees who hold Proof of Registration cards (PoR), which have been issued jointly by UNHCR and the Pakistani government since 2006; holders of Afghan Citizen Cards (ACC), provided by the Pakistani government since 2017; and undocumented Afghans. There are around one million Afghan citizen cardholders and undocumented Afghans in Pakistan. The type of document held by an individual in Pakistan – or lack of one – also influences the level of support provided by UN agencies should they return to Afghanistan: UNHCR solely assists PoR cardholders and anyone returning voluntarily, while the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) aids the undocumented and ACC cardholder returnees.The first phase of implementation of the Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan began on 3 October 2023, after Islamabad endorsed the plan to repatriate those Afghans – over a million people – who did not possess valid documents. More than 722,000 Afghans returned to Afghanistan between 15 September 2023 and 16 September 2024, most of them undocumented.[3]The second phase of the plan, which targets undocumented and ACC cardholders, commenced on 1 April 2025. To date, 230,500 Afghans have returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan during this phase, according to the UNHCR; this number included 42,800 deportees. “The majority of returnees are undocumented (70%), followed by ACC holders (19%) and Proof of Registration (PoR) card holders (11%),” the UNHCR saidVarious media reports and officials from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA)confirmed the raids and forced deportation of some Afghans.[4] At least according to returnees’ videos posted on social media, most of the deportations appear to have been from Punjab and Sindh, with comparatively few from Balochistan.Islamabad has said it plans to send PoR cardholders back to Afghanistan in the third phase. They were granted a one-year extension to stay in Pakistan in June 2024. It will expire on 30 June 2025.However, holding a PoR card may not be enough protection from being forced to return. One Afghan living in the Loralai district of Balochistan who asked not to be named told AAN that two men from his village were arrested on 5 April. He said that one had a PoR card on him. “We knew a colonel and went to his home to get the release of our villagers, at least the one who has PoR. He told us that when someone was arrested, no matter what kind of document he had, he would be deported.” The refugee then said that his fellow villagers had still not been released. The UNHCR documented an increase in the number of PoR cardholders returning. “From May, the percentage of PoR cardholders returning rose to 21 per cent, from 6 per cent in April,” UNHCR said.Selling belongings, or leaving them behindAll our interviewees had jobs or small businesses in Pakistan. Abdul Halim from Kunduz province was buying and reselling wooden planks. He had made a cart for his motorbike, which, as will be seen below, he had to leave in Pakistan, and was selling the wooden planks from that cart. Akhtar Muhammad from Faryab province was a scrap dealer. Shukrullah from Kunduz, who returned from Pindi district of Punjab with his brother, was a shopkeeper. He owned a clothing shop, as well as another shop there. Naik Muhammad from Kandahar province, had a grocery shop in Loralai district*.*One complaint by returnees that is widespread on social media is that the Pakistani police are not allowing them to pack up their belongings and take them. This was the case for all four of our interviewees.For example, Abdul Halim, one of the returnees from Kunduz, said, “I wasn’t able to bring all my belongings. I only brought pots, quilts and mattresses. I couldn’t bring my motorbike or my four goats. I just had to leave them because there wasn’t a chance of getting a sale.” Abdul Halim had also owned a house in Karachi where he was living.I tried to sell it*.** In fact, people offered me only a pittance. Property prices had plummeted. My house was valued at 2,000,000 rupees [USD 7,150]. I left it and didn’t sell it. It wasn’t confiscated, but I’m still afraid the police will seize it. We have a proverb in Pashto: Even if it’s a gold-knife, a human doesn’t stab it in his own belly. I told an Afghan family, who had been renting a house [in Karachi], to live in my house for free until I could find an opportunity to sell it in the future. Now, that family is living in my house.*Akhtar Muhammad’s business, also in Karachi, involved buying and selling second-hand items, “like pots and plastic bits and pieces.” However, when he was deported, he was unable to sell many of hiswares: “[They were] worth in total about 200,000 Pakistani rupees [USD 720]. I left those items behind.” He did manage to sell his house, but has yet to receive the full payment.I couldn’t cash all my assets. I sold my house for rupees 7,500,000 [USD 26,800]. However, I hadn’t received the rupees 1,500,000 [USD 5,400] from the buyer [before we left]. I wasn’t given the opportunity to collect that money. I requested the police not to deport me and my family and to allow me some time to get my money, but they refused. Consequently, I couldn’t bring that cash.Naik Muhammad from Kandahar province, who returned from Quetta, said he was not prevented from selling his “two cows, which together cost 1,000,000 rupees [USD 3,600]. I sold them for 300,000 rupees [USD 1,100] in total. They didn’t give us the chance to bring them to the country.” He also sold his grocery shop and all the inventory: “I was fortunate to sell the shop’s items to someone a couple of months ago. I was concerned the situation would once again worsen, as it did two years ago. Thus, I decided to sell the items.” Naik Muhammad’s experience of the police in Quetta was better than the other interviewees:They didn’t prevent us from selling our assets. In fact, they treated us very well. We’d spent a lot of time there. We knew each other well and they were part of our tribe. The police and other officials were even unhappy about deporting us, but they’d to adhere to the laws of their government.Shukrullah was only able to take household goods, like appliances, quilts and mattresses, with him back to Afghanistan. He had to leave everything behind in his shops in Rawalpindi:Aside from what was in the house, we couldn’t sell anything else. We hid at home and weren’t planning to open our shops. We knew that if they saw us, they wouldn’t allow us to take our belongings or sell them. We decided to keep the shops closed. We’d paid rent for our shops to their owners. We thought that after returning to Afghanistan, conditions would improve and we’d be able to travel with the necessary documents, or we’d ask our relatives who hold PoR cards to sell them. We’d lent clothes to the local people worth rupees 250,000, around [USD 900]. We weren’t able to retrieve that money either.What do the returnees get when they cross into Afghanistan?When they return to Afghanistan, people get support from the Emirate and the UN. The level of UN assistance has always depended on the status of the returnees in Pakistan: UNHCR used to give PoR cardholders 375 USD per family member upon their arrival in Afghanistan and then USD 700 to each family after passing three months in the country. IOM gave a more limited package of food and non-food items and cash to ACC cardholders and those without documents.The IEA is facing a severe funding shortfall and has cut public sector jobs by a fifth this year. On 7 April, acting Prime Minister Muhammad Hasan Akhund requested assistance from the United Nations to help prevent “this human disaster” and facilitate the “dignified” repatriation of refugees (Mashal Radio). However, the UN is also facing a funding crisis. Since the United States ended all aid to Afghanistan, the UN agencies, funds and programmes have had to cut back their support.[5] Spokesman for UNHCR in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Qaiser Khan Afridi told the FM radio station, SUNO Pakhtunkhwa that due to a global shortage of funding, they were now giving PoR cardholders 140 US dollars per family and an additional 20 dollars per member to help with transport costs.The returnees we interviewed, none of them PoR cardholders, had all received cash from IOM and the Emirate, as well as other help, including transport to their final destination. Abdul Halim told AAN:The Taliban gave me 8,000 afghanis [USD 110] in Enzargai camp in Kandahar where we spent a night. They gave us dinner and breakfast in the camp and then rented a vehicle to take us to Kabul and then another vehicle to take us on to Kunduz. They also rented another vehicle to take us and our luggage. We were also given some biscuits and hygiene stuff and also 5,800 afghanis [USD 82] – I think it was IOM who gave us that.Akhtar Muhammad also said he had received cash from both the IEA and IOM.We received 20,000 afghanis [USD 280] from the Taliban, 10,000 to each of the two families in the household. We were also provided with some biscuits and cakes and some soup, towels, shampoo and other [hygiene-related] things from IOM. And they also paid us some cash. The Taliban also provided us with transport from Kandahar to Kabul and on to Faryab.Shukrullah said he received 5,800 afghanis [USD 81] from IOM and 10,000 afghanis [USD 140] in the Omari returnees’ camp in Torkham, as well as transport to Kabul. Naik Muhammad got transport to his district in Kandahar from the Taliban, along with 10,000 afghanis [USD 140] and almost 5,000 afghanis from IOM, alongside food and hygiene items.No help in finding a new homeFinding somewhere to live back in Afghanistan was the main problem for all our interviewees. Only Akhtar Muhammad had both agricultural land and a house in his place of origin – in Qaisar district of Faryab. All the others have either rented somewhere to live in their home province, although not their districts, or have moved in with relatives. For example, Abdul Halim said he had neither a house in his district in Kunduz, nor farmland, so chose to stay in the outskirts of Kunduz city where his maternal uncle gave them a room in his house.Shukrullah from Dasht-e Archi in Kunduz and Naik Muhammad from Ghurak district of Kandahar also have no homes or farmland in their places of origin, so chose to live in Kabul and the Daman district of Kandahar, respectively, and pay rents for the houses where they now live.The IEA has established a camp in Torkham, known as Omari Camp, for returnees who do not have homes to go to. The purpose of this facility is to identify returnees without accommodation and house them in the camp until they can arrange housing in their places of origin or elsewhere. A similar setup was planned and approved for returnees in Kandahar province, but according to an IEA employee, who wished to remain unnamed, it had yet to be implemented due, he said, to the negligence of the committee assigned to this task.The Emirate has also announced and promised that it will provide each family of returnees with land so they can build houses for themselves. It has also announced local offers. For example, on 20 April 2025, Pajhwok news agency, quoting the Ministry of Urban Development and Land, reported that the IEA had recently started building a township for newly-arriving returnees on 3,000 jeribs [600 hectares] of land in Chahar Dara district of Kunduz province. According to Pajhwok on 5 January 2025, the IEA announced that 48 townships had been built by the IEA in 30 provinces of the country and that, in nine provinces, it had allocated 28,116 jeribs [5,623 hectares] of land to those forced to return from Pakistan and Iran (Pajhwok).Education opportunities left in PakistanThe children of all our interviewees had been going to school in Pakistan. For example, Abdul Halim had two daughters in class three and four sons in classes four and six, with three others not yet of school age.One of Naik Muhammad’s daughters, who was in class eight in Pakistan, will no longer be able to continue her education, as the IEA has banned schooling for girls above class six. Yet the problems with schooling in Afghanistan go wider. According to a UN’s Children’ Fund (UNICEF)report, “an estimated 4 million children in Afghanistan are reported to be out of school. Many are unable to attend due to lack of proper school buildings, safe water and clean sanitation facilities, and lack of qualified teachers – particularly women. Children often drop out due to economic barriers, sometimes forced into child labour to help their families earn an income.” Naik Muhammad also highlighted problems even for boys returning. His two sons had been in college in Pakistan, but only managed to bring their school [matriculation] certificates with them. They will face challenges proving they were first-year college students and if they have to take an exam for a college or university to determine which class they would fit into, this will further complicate matters. They studied in Pakistan where the curriculum is in Urdu or English, while they will need to take the exam in Pashto or Dari.What is next for those who have returned?Since 2023, more than 2.4 million Afghans have returned from Pakistan and Iran to Afghanistan; some were deported. In their impoverished and internationally isolated homeland, most returnees face a bleak prospect with few job opportunities. Indeed, this is a particularly hard time to return, when the IEA has just fired hundreds of thousands of government employees to try and balance the books, and President Trump has completely stopped US aid.It is now, of course, also more difficult for Afghans to leave for neighbouring countries if life becomes just too difficult. In this report, we interviewed longstanding Afghan residents of Pakistan, but, according to one official in Kandahar, some of the recently returned families had re-emigrated to Pakistan in the last year. In other words, despite having to return to Afghanistan, they had tried again to leave. Possibly, more Afghans will seek ways to get to distant Europe, but that is a long and dangerous journey, mainly only an option taken by single men with some means to pay smugglers, or with hopes of picking up work along the way to pay for their passage. The other issue is that at least some of the returnees were single men working to send back remittances to their families.All in all, the forced returns involve a loss of remittances, which is a blow to individual households and the national economy, alongside more people in need for the Afghan state and society to try to deal with, and, of course, hardship and misery for the Afghans directly involved.Edited by Jelena Bjelica and Kate ClarkReferencesReferences↑1In this report, we use the term, ‘returnee’, despite the notion of return being complicated by the fact that many of those arriving in Afghanistan are new to the country, having been born in Pakistan.↑2We asked the four menvarious questions: whether they had returned voluntarily or been forced to leave Pakistan; whether they had brought their belongings with them or been able to sell them; if they had faced problems from the Pakistani police; how they had earned a living in Pakistan and whether their children had gone to school there; had they received help from the government or UN agencies or NGOs; did they have a house or agricultural land in their places of origin to return back to and what were their main concerns about living in Afghanistan.↑3See the AAN report, Returning from Pakistan: How are Afghan returnees coping back in their homeland?, 29 September 2024.↑4For example*,* an IEA official in Spin Boldak in Kandahar province told AAN that Pakistani police conducted a raid in the village of Kastom Khalifa (also known as Kastom Khalifa Sahib,the village is named after an Afghan Sufi who died about 10 to 15 years ago and was respected on both sides of the Durand Line). The official said that approximately 120 individuals, including women and children, were sent back from Pakistan.↑5According to the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the US disbursed USD 40 million to UNHCR in Afghanistan in 2024 and USD 42.6 million to IOM. Before the cuts were implemented, it had given UNHCR USD 6.8 million and IOM USD 20.3 million. See Table F.9, SIGAR Quarterly Report to Congress, 30 January 2025, p118. See also AAN’s 9 May report, The End of US Aid to Afghanistan: What will it mean for families, services and the economy?.Revisions:This article was last updated on 20 Jun 2025