Our humanitarian aid worker, Guglielmo Rapino, recounts the work we do in Kandahar province to help the thousands of Afghans who are returning from Pakistan following the Pakistani government’s decision to remove all undocumented foreign nationals from the country
Almost 500,000 Afghans have left Pakistan to return to their country since the Pakistani government announced an immediate return plan for undocumented foreign nationals in early November 2023. (United Nations data)
“After the initial peak in November, when thousands of people arrived en masse, today the number has gradually decreased“, says Guglielmo Rapino, an INTERSOS aid worker in Afghanistan. “Currently, in the formal camp of Takthapol, set up by the Afghan government close to the border, between 50 and 100 families a day are arriving. Other reception camps have also been set up in Kandahar province, coordinated by the government, where INTERSOS and other humanitarian organisations provide assistance“.
The two main arrival points are the camps of Torkham and Spin Boldak. The families, 80% of whom are mainly women and children, find refreshment here to recover their energy after travelling; they find food, drinking water and shelter from the cold. “People only stay in the camps for a few days, long enough to recover from the long journey. Then they return to their home towns or villages“, says Rapino.
Millions of Afghans have fled over the past forty years to neighbouring Pakistan since the beginning of the Soviet occupation in 1979. A flight that has continued, dictated by the need to save themselves from constant internal and external conflicts. Since the Taliban took power in the summer of 2021, some 600,000 people have left Afghanistan for Pakistan.
Returning home now, for them, means returning to a country exhausted by a chronic food and employment crisis. In this country, more than 23 million people need humanitarian assistance, where 13 million are suffering from hunger, of whom more than 12 million are children.
“There is a need for medical care but also psychological assistance. All these people have suffered trauma and were forced to leave years of a life built elsewhere only to have to return from where they had fled to find a better future. We at INTERSOS are operational, with a mobile clinic, to visit and treat those in need and to provide them with psychosocial support“, says Rapino, who has been living in Afghanistan for a year and tells of what he sees on the ground in Kandahar province.
Those who have been forced to return to Afghanistan also have to contend with the impossibility of finding employment, getting young people to study, getting medical care, or even being able to guarantee three meals a day. “No one can guarantee them a better life here. However, what struck me was the great solidarity of the community in welcoming them back and the fact that, despite the many difficulties, many people I spoke to appeared happy to be back in their land that they had been missing for so long. Here in Afghanistan, they feel respected – says Rapino – while often in Pakistan, they felt rejected; they lived in a climate of racism that never made them feel welcome“.
Among the Afghans who have returned to the country, however, some have now seen Afghanistan for the first time after having lived all their lives in Pakistan.
“We do not yet know if there will be new waves of arrivals in the coming months“, Rapino adds. “We will continue to bring them relief, and we will also do so by moving with our mobile clinics to the many informal camps that have sprung up near the border, where humanitarian aid often does not arrive“.
“There is one image I will never forget – he says at the end of his story – that of the big trucks loaded with people. They are colourful trucks full of drawings and paintings, tractors loaded with heirlooms and furniture, blankets, and everything else they managed to take with them from their homes. They look like carnival floats arriving in Afghanistan with the tragedy of their lives packed into a few things, held on a truck that also contains all their hope”.