UN urged to take notice of refugees’ harassment

KABUL.

The YANRC spokesman Sayyed Maisam Ihsan in a press conference said: “Recent reports have shown that the government of Pakistan has forced Afghan refugees to take part in militant activities in Afghanistan, otherwise they will face the harassment.”

He said Pakistani security officials has been arresting innocent refugees from roads and streets and putting them behind the bars. He demanded that the Afghan government should take notice of the situation.

Ihsan claimed over 3,000 Afghan refugees had been deported from Pakistan and that their harassment was against international norms and agreement between the government of Pakistan and the International Organization of Migration (IOM).

Earlier, the IOM in Afghanistan said that thousands of Afghan families are fleeing Pakistan to escape harassment after a deadly Taliban attack on Army Public School in Peshawar.

In a statement posted on its website, Richard Danzinger, the IOM’s mission chief in Afghanistan, said more than 22,000 undocumented Afghans flocked across the border at Torkham in January, more than twice the figure for the whole of 2014.

In January this year nearly 24,000 undocumented Afghans entered Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province through Pakistan’s Torkham border crossing.

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