Nasim was walking towards Pakistan’s border earlier this week, leaving the only place he has ever known. Like him, tens of thousands of other Afghan refugees have been given a deadline to leave the nation.”I went to school in Pakistan; I was born here,” stated Nasim, who had come from the northern city of Peshawar to the border crossing at Torkham. “I’ve lived here for 42 years. “I haven’t visited Afghanistan before.”
Pakistan ordered all Afghan refugees and migrants without formal identity documents to leave the country by November 1 and threatened to deport anyone who stayed after that date, a move that has flipped many lives upside down.
That has left Nasim, who only uses one name, and many others like him facing the grim prospect of a new life under the repressive rule of the Taliban.
Since seizing control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the radical Islamist group has cracked down on women’s rights, closed secondary schools for girls, banned women from attending university or entering many public spaces, and prohibited them from working in most sectors. Under its watch the country has also been grappling with widespread hunger, disease and lack of clean water.
But Nasim and other migrants have little choice but to head back. On Thursday, Pakistani authorities began rounding up those who remained, with more than 100 arrested in the city of Quetta and taken to holding centers.When CNN visited the Torkham border crossing on Wednesday, it was full of trucks piled high with old furniture, suitcases, and mattresses; crowds of migrants huddled on dirt roads, clutching their children and meager belongings.
“We didn’t have money, we left our business, our homes, it was difficult for us to get here. There is no water here,” said Nasim.“My children have been pulled out of school – the day my children didn’t go to school was like a day of dying for me,” Nasim added. “In Afghanistan there is no school for girls.”
Located at the western edge of the famed Khyber Pass, Torkham has seen generations of Afghans flee and return during the tumultuous four decades of war that have blighted the nation.Many fled the Soviet invasion in the 1980s and the mujahideen’s long, eventually successful fight back. Others took flight during the civil war that erupted following the Soviet retreat that led to the Taliban’s initial rise.
A new generation went to Pakistan in the aftermath of September 11 attacks, ebbing and flowing during the near two decades of conflict that followed. The Taliban’s return to power in 2021 following the United States’ chaotic withdrawal sparked another wave of some 600,000 refugees.Now Afghans from all those different generations are being told to go back.
Source: Here