OP-ED - Afghans, the Refugees’ Refugees, nytimes

KABUL, Afghanistan — When Ahmad was deported from Turkey early this year, he came to live under a bridge called Pul-i-Sokhta, in the western part of the city. The bridge, which spans a dried-up riverbed, has been an unofficial meeting place for drug addicts for years. But recently men like Ahmad — men who cashed in their lives in Afghanistan for a chance at something better elsewhere, men who were betrayed by fortune and forced to return — have been congregating here, to smoke up, shoot up, pilfer and beg.

On a visit one afternoon last month, it took some time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness under the bridge. Then I saw the bodies splayed over other bodies on top of islands of trash. In between the mounds of wasting men flowed trickles of water carrying garbage and excrement. Ahmad — he wouldn’t give a last name — guessed that about half of Pul-i-Sokhta’s 200 or so residents were recent deportees.

According to the United Nations’ refugee agency, UNHCR, there were more than 3.8 million Afghan refugees in 2001. The number had dropped by the mid-2000s, a time of hope that came with the presence of NATO forces in Afghanistan. But as the security situation deteriorated, the number of refugees swelled again, reaching some 2.6 million by the fall of 2015.

Most Afghans who flee go to neighboring Pakistan and Iran, but increasingly they have also headed farther west. More than 178,000 Afghans applied for asylum in Europe in 2015, almost four times the number for the previous year, according to E.U. statistics.

Some 5.8 million Afghans have voluntarily returned to Afghanistan since 2002 under a UNHCR repatriation program. But many have also been forced back: Last year, nearly 260,000 undocumented Afghans were deported from Pakistan and Iran alone. - Read More

Afghans, the Refugees’ Refugees