KABUL – As many as 24,048 Afghan citizens returned to their homeland last week, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Wednesday.
At least 409 Afghan refugees returned from neighboring Pakistan, 408 from Iran and one from another country, OCHA stated in a report.
From Pakistan, 587 Afghan citizens returned on their own while 44 were deported. From Iran, 12,954 people returned voluntarily and 10,054 were deported, the report added.
It is also highlighted that during the current year so far, 175,850 people have been verified as having been displaced by conflict, according to OCHA’s Displacement Tracking System.
As per UNHCR, Pakistan is hosting the largest number of refugees globally, which number more than 1.45 million in the country, and most of them hail from Afghanistan.
Similarly, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of 2016 there are 951,142 registered Afghan citizens living in Iran. Most of these were born and raised in Iran during the last three and a half decades. The Government of Iran estimates that 2.5 million Afghans live in Iran, which includes the registered and illegals as well as those who entered the country with Afghan passports and Iranian visas.
Since March 2002, UNHCR has facilitated the return of approximately 4.1 million registered Afghans from Pakistan, it underlined.
