Newsnomics AJAY ANGELINA reporter |
Pakistan issued orders to all undocumented immigrants especially 1.73 million Afghan nationals to voluntarily leave the country or face deportations.
“November 1 is the deadline for all Afghan nationals to voluntarily leave the country. “If they will not go, … then all the law enforcement agencies in the provinces or federal government will actively take action to deport them from Pakistan,” said Sarfraz Bugti, Interior Minister of Pakistan on Tuesday.
Pakistan Interior minister, Bugti also warned of a crackdown on property and businesses owned by the Afghan nationals in Pakistan.
“Pakistan would allow entry only to Afghan nationals with valid passports and visas and will try it’s best to accomplish many visas for Afghan deportees who would like to come back”, Bugti added.
The "one document regime" policy will replace the decades-old practice of granting special travel permits to individuals with divided tribes straddling the nearly 2,600-kilometer (1,600-mile) border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The crackdown on undocumented Afghan immigrants is the result of increasing terrorist attacks in Pakistan in recent months is being directed from militant sanctuaries in Afghanistan.
"We have come under 24 suicide bomb attacks since January, and 14 of them were carried out by Afghan nationals," Bugti said.
He also added that “the eight of the 11 militants who recently raided two Pakistani military installations in Southwestern Baluchistan province were Afghans.”
"We have evidence that Afghans were involved in these attacks and are taking up the issue through our foreign ministry with Taliban authorities in Afghanistan," he said.
Bugti said the involvement of Afghans in violence attacks showed that "they are not honoring the edict" of Hibatullah Akhunddza, the supreme leader of the Taliban, that forbids cross-border attacks.
"We hope and respect him greatly and expect his edict to be enforced in letter and spirit," he added.
A total of 4.4 million Afghan refugees are residing in Pakistan out of which 1.73 million Afghan migrants have no legal documents to stay in the country as Islamabad has received the largest influx of Afghan refugees since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
The United Nation figures out 1.3 million registered Afghans refugees as well as more than 880,000 with legal status of stay in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s announcement, called “harassment” by the Afghan embassy in Islamabad, marked a new low in its relations with Kabul, which have deteriorated since border clashes between the South Asian neighbors last month.
In a statement on X, the embassy said more than 1,000 Afghans have been detained in the past two weeks-half of them despite having a legal right to be in Pakistan said the Afghan embassy in a statement on X, formerly twitter.
“Despite the repeated promises of the Pakistan authorities, the arrest and harassment of Afghan refugees by the police in Pakistan continues,” it said.
“After Mastung blast, we are working on a multi-pronged strategy. We have to get the Afghans out. We have to enforce the law and [have] zero tolerance for lawlessness,” interior secretary Aftab Durrani told Arab News, referring to one of the attacks last week in which 60 people were killed in southwest Pakistan.
“We have to target militant groups. We have to target the political parties’ militant wings and basically our theme is hardening the state, hardening the writ of the state as this is not a soft state. We are a tough state. And we can take any action.”
