Afghan refugees in Pakistan
Courtesy:- Syed Mohammad Ali For more than three decades, Pakistan has been home to one of the world’s largest refugee communities due to multiple waves of Afghans crossing over the porous international border to flee repeated bouts of escalating conflict within their war-ravaged country. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had unleashed the first wave of refugees into Pakistan and neighbouring Iran, but then more refugees came to escape years of civil war, and then the brutality of the Taliban regime. Since the 2001 US-led invasion of Afg hanistan, some 3.8 million have returned home, but around 1.7 million registered Afghan refugees chose to remain in Pakistan, with roughly another million living among our midst illegally.