‘Where do I go back to?’: Expelled Afghans battle chaos at Pakistan border

Al Jazeera :
Syed Muhammed is holding a prescription a doctor wrote for his ailing mother, whom he carried on his shoulders to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. But there are no shops to buy medicines.

“What use do I have for this paper? There is no market here.

I don’t have any money.

Where do I get the medicine for my mother now?” he asked Al Jazeera.

Muhammad is among nearly 1.7 million undocumented Afghan refugees and migrants ordered by the Pakistani government to leave the country by Wednesday.

“Holding centres” have been set up in all of the country’s four provinces to detain “illegal” foreign nationals who do not leave by the deadline.

Most of the refugees and migrants have converged at the Torkham border crossing in northwestern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, awaiting exit formalities being conducted by officials belonging to Pakistan’s National Database Registration Authority.

The paperwork has resulted in a huge queue.

There are no shelters, so families have been forced to sleep on top of trucks and on the open ground.

Chaotic scenes have been witnessed at the transit point amid fears of a government crackdown starting Thursday against those who remain in Pakistan.

Officials said more than four million foreigners live in Pakistan, a vast majority of them Afghan nationals who have sought refuge over the past four decades.

The exodus began with the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and continued during the post-9/11 US invasion and the second takeover of the government in Kabul by the Taliban in 2021.

Refugees such as Azeemullah Mohmand said their lives had been completely uprooted and they have no idea how to restart them in Afghanistan, where decades of conflict have disrupted its economy and created a humanitarian crisis.