Deadline for 'undocumented' foreigners to leave Pakistan ends Tuesday

By Islamuddin Sajid

ISLAMABAD (AA) - A deadline for "undocumented" foreigners to leave Pakistan ends on Tuesday as Islamabad is preparing for a crackdown across the country.

Police made announcements from mosques in the capital Islamabad that undocumented foreigners, including many who had fled from neighboring Afghanistan, that this was the last day to leave the country.

The caretaker government, formed as the country gears up for elections next year, had announced earlier this month plans to deport all undocumented foreigners after a deadline at the end of October.

Over the past month, some 92,928 Afghan refugees have left the country and returned to Kabul, according to state-run broadcaster Pakistan Television.

Last week, the UN human rights office urged Islamabad to halt its plans as they would affect thousands of Afghans living within its borders.

It said more than 2 million undocumented Afghans were living in Pakistan, including at least 600,000 who left Afghanistan after the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.

For its part, Islamabad has stressed that "only illegal foreigners" would be repatriated to their country under the initiative.

"The decision is in exercise of Pakistan's sovereign domestic laws, and compliant with applicable international norms and principles," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said on Monday.

Afghanistan's Taliban-led interim administration has also urged Islamabad to reverse its decision. But last week, Pakistan's caretaker Interior Minister Sarfraz Bugti said the government had no plan to extend the deadline and that all foreigners would be deported regardless of their nationality.

Islamabad has also alleged, citing government investigations, that several Afghans were involved in terrorist attacks in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and southwestern Balochistan province this year.

On Monday, hundreds of Afghans staged protests in Islamabad and demanded a reversal of the plans that threaten to uproot them once again and potentially put their lives in jeopardy if returned to Kabul.

Pakistan has been hosting a large number of Afghan refugees since the 1979 Soviet invasion of its northern neighbor, with nearly 2.9 million still living in the country.

According to a report by the Ministry of States and Frontier Regions, which deals with Afghan refugees, 700,000 Afghans living in the country have no documentation, compared to more than 2.1 million registered with Pakistan authorities and/or the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency.