Govt prepares plan to bring displaced NWA families home from Afghanistan

PESHAWAR: The government has started preparations to bring home around 7,000 families who had migrated to Afghanistan when the military operation Zarb-e-Azb was launched in North Waziristan Agency in June 2014.

Kamran Ahmad Afridi, political agent of North Waziristan, told The News that efforts are being made to start the return process of the displaced Pakistani families from Afghanistan in the last week of July or first week of August.

“Initially, the plan was to start bringing them home from July 20, but it was delayed so that the computerised national identity cards (CNICs) of these residents of North Waziristan could be first verified by Nadra,” he said.

He put at 30,000 to 40,000 the total number of Pakistanis from North Waziristan presently living in Afghanistan.  He said about 30 percent of them were living in camps and 40 percent with their relatives while the remaining had gone to Kabul and other places.

Kamran Afridi said return forms have been sent through tribal elders to Afghanistan to be filled up by the dislocated Pakistani families.

He explained that every family has to provide details about the names of their members and CNIC along with their tribe and village.

He added that the identification process would be completed once the CNICs are verified by Nadra while taking care that militants aren’t able to come back along with the returnees.

He said some preliminary work was done earlier by asking the displaced families to provide details of their livestock, vehicles and other assets.

He said a jirga of elders of the sub-tribes that shifted to Afghanistan was held at the border town of Ghulam Khan in North Waziristan to consult them about the plan to bring them home.

According to Kamran Afridi, the Afghanistan-based Pakistani families would be asked to enter Pakistan at the Ghulam Khan border in batches of 200.

“The government would provide transport to carry the returning Pakistani families to the Bakkakhel camp in Frontier Region Bannu. Like the other temporarily displaced persons, they too would be provided the Watan cards for getting compensation,” he said.

As the government is planning to send home all the remaining displaced families from North Waziristan by November this year, those returning from Afghanistan would also be sent to their villages around that time.

The figure of 30,000-40,000 Pakistanis who migrated from North Waziristan at the time of the launching of the operation Zar-e-Azb provided by Pakistani authorities is much below than given by the Afghan government.

At the time, Afghan officials claimed 22,722 Pakistani families totalling 186,711 had shifted to Afghanistan’s Khost and Paktika province from North Waziristan.

Pakistani authorities had later claimed that about 30,000 Pakistanis had returned home from Afghanistan due to the tough conditions across the border. Some of these families living in the areas bordering Afghanistan had hurriedly left North Waziristan as it was easier to cross the border than reach Bannu due to the rush of people on the roads and lack of transport.

This was the first time that so many Pakistanis had migrated to Afghanistan. Until then, Afghans were coming to Pakistan to escape the fighting in their country or in some cases to avail better means of livelihood.