2023-12-31 07:32:02
TORKHAM, Afghanistan (AP) — The arid desert plain between the mountains of eastern Afghanistan is now home to hundreds of thousands of people.
Some live in tents. Others outdoors, among the piles of the few belongings they were able to take with them after being forced to leave neighboring Pakistan.
The sprawling camp of people returning to Afghanistan through the Torkham border crossing is the latest example of Afghans’ long and painful search for a stable home.
More than 40 years of war, violence and poverty in Afghanistan have created one of the most rootless populations in the world. Some six million Afghans are refugees outside the country. Another 3.5 million are displaced within the nation of 40 million people after leaving their homes behind due to war, earthquakes, drought or resource scarcity.
For months, an Associated Press photographer traveled across Afghanistan from its eastern border with Pakistan to its western border with Iran to meet displaced people and returned refugees and immortalize them.
Afghanistan is already a poor country, especially after the economic collapse that followed the Taliban’s takeover two years ago. More than 28 million people — two-thirds of the population — depend on international aid to survive.
The displaced are the poorest of the poor. Many live in camps across the country and cannot afford to buy food or firewood to keep warm in the winter. Women and children often engage in begging. Others marry their young daughters to families willing to pay them.
In a camp for internally displaced people on the outskirts of Kabul, it was 15-year-old Shamila’s wedding day. She was standing, dressed in a bright red dress and surrounded by the women of her family, who congratulated her, but she felt sad.
“I have no choice. If I do not accept, my family will be harmed,” said Shamila, whose father did not reveal her last name for fear of being identified by the Taliban. The groom’s family will give money to his father to pay the debts he assumed in order to support his wife and his children.
“I wanted to study and work, I should have gone to school,” Shamila said. “I have to forget all my dreams (…) to at least be able to help my father and my family a little and maybe take a weight off their shoulders.”
Pakistan’s decision to deport Afghans who entered the country illegally has been a major setback. Many Afghans had been living there for decades after escaping successive wars in their homeland. When the order was announced, hundreds of thousands feared arrest and fled back to Afghanistan. Pakistani authorities often prevented them from taking anything with them, they said.
Their first stop has been the camp in Torkham, where they may spend days or weeks before Taliban-controlled government authorities send them to a camp elsewhere. With little to eat and to protect themselves from the cold of the mountains, many there are sick.
In a corner of the settlement, at the foot of a mountain, Farooq Sadiq, 55, sits among some of his belongings, wrapped in cloth, with his wife and children on the floor next to him. Sadiq said he had lived in the Pakistani city of Peshawar for 30 years and had a house there. Now they have nothing, not even a tarp, and they had been sleeping on the floor for eight nights.
“I have nothing in Afghanistan, no house, no place to live, no enough money to buy a house,” he said. She hopes to settle somewhere in the country and get a visa to return to Pakistan, sell her house there and use the money for his family.
The expulsions from Pakistan have increased the already high number of Afghans trying to migrate to Iran to look for work there.
Every month, thousands cross into Iran at the border near Zaranj. It is a dangerous route: in the dead of night, with the help of human traffickers, they climb a wall using ladders and jump to the other side.
Most of them are young boys, between 12 and 20 years old, and they use this system in the hope of being able to work in Iran and send money to their families. Many are intercepted by the Iranian border guard and returned to their country.
The other route is longer and includes a car trip of several hours to the southwestern border of Afghanistan, where they pass through Pakistan to reach the border with Iran, crossing mountains and deserts. In Pakistan, insurgents from the Sunni group Jundallah often attack migrants, killing or kidnapping those who are Shiites.
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