KHYBER: Repatriation of undocumented Afghan nationals has considerably slowed down in recent weeks due to poor living conditions coupled with the impending harsh winter in most parts of Afghanistan, officials say.
Sources in Landi Kotal and Torkham told Dawn that 10-15 families were returning to Afghanistan daily, compared to hundreds recorded last September and August.
An official at the Hamza Baba registration centre said that the return process had slowed down over the last few weeks, with a mere 100 individuals, mostly children, going back compared to over 1,000 daily until the last week of September.
Officials attribute trend to poor living conditions, impending harsh winter
Requesting anonymity, he said that they had not registered children below the age of 10 due to the excessive workload involved in registering returning Afghans until September but were even registering children as young as three in order to meet the numbers.
He said that the families now returning to Afghanistan were those whose male heads had either been forcibly deported in the recent past or had stayed back due to protracted illness and were undergoing treatment at different hospitals.
He said that there were also those who had been arrested by the police in different cities during the crackdown against ‘illegal aliens’, as they were mostly without valid travel documents and were thus brought to the border under police escort for deportation.
Waheedullah, a clearing agent at Torkham, told this scribe that those brought for deportation were taken straight to the border Zero Point, while those referred from Azakhel, Nowshera, Nasir Bagh, Peshawar and Landi Kotal transit points were issued tokens there and then brought to the customs terminal at Torkham, where their belongings underwent both manual and electronic scanning before their repatriation.
He said that a proforma for every returning family was prepared at the time of registration, which was then presented to the customs authorities for onward uploading onto the Goods Declaration form before a gate pass was issued for crossing the border.
“The clearance process of the returning families at the customs terminal resembles the clearing of trade goods at the said terminal,” he said.
He said that most families returning to Afghanistan were extremely poor, with almost all of them being ethnic Pakhtuns from border regions.
He said that a majority of the affluent families, including non-Pakhtuns, had returned in the early period of repatriation, while those who had problems finding suitable accommodation had stayed back in the hope that they might be given some relaxation by Pakistani authorities.
Mujeebullah Shinwari, president of the Torkham Customs Clearing Agents Association, said that a sizable number of undocumented Afghans still residing in Pakistan were extremely concerned about their future in Afghanistan owing to inadequate economic opportunities, schooling and healthcare facilities for their children and, above all, a lack of proper residential facilities.
He said that most of the remaining Afghans were labourers with limited or no skills, while they had also lost
contact with host communities in Afghanistan over several decades.
“The coming six months are extremely testing for those who are going back now, as they have very limited resources to tackle the harsh winter, limited or no sources of income and very few houses to provide them with adequate shelter,” he said. Meanwhile, complaints about the theft or mysterious disappearance of costly personal items belonging to returning Afghans during customs clearance and border crossing have surfaced in recent weeks.
Sources in Torkham said that transporters who had shifted personal belongings of returnees had registered complaints with local authorities about the theft of certain “valuable” items, with the returning families deducting a considerable amount from transport fare as a penalty.
They said that returning Afghans had also complained about the confiscation of some of their personal items, including essential medicines and other goods, by border authorities, despite these having been cleared during electronic and manual scanning and customs clearance.
Sources said that several such complaints had been lodged with both border and customs authorities for the return of confiscated items, but the verification process by the authorities was painfully slow, much to the disappointment of the returning families.
They said that the process for claiming back confiscated items was very complicated, as the complainant had to approach the customs authorities, where the assistant collector of customs forwarded the application to the superintendent and then to the inspector for verification. Permission from the Pakistan Land and Port Authority and the National Logistics Corporation was also mandatory.
Sources said that the process for reclaiming lost items was so complicated, lengthy and painful that a number of Afghans withdrew their complaints, leaving the stolen or confiscated items at the mercy of the border authorities.
The customs clearing agents who supervise the clearance of returning Afghans have called for a halt to such illegal activities, saying they were bringing a bad name to the country’s institutions.
Published in Dawn, November 10th, 2026
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