KHYBER: As many as 50 captured Afghan children were sent back to their country by the Pakistani authorities via the Torkham border on ‘humanitarian’ grounds late on 23rd March evening after the intervention of a tribal jirga.
Local police official Adnan Khan told Dawn that those children, including 17 girls, were seized at Torkham border point after they trespassed into the Pakistani territory by cutting the fence near the main border crossing while taking cover of the darkness after sunset.
He said that most children were less than 10 years of age, with none of them possessing any legal travel documents.
“We wanted to book them under the 14 Foreign Act but had to submit to the demand of the local jirga members who had requested their repatriation without any legal action as they’re mostly minors. The jirga insisted that the children shouldn’t be sent to jail,” he said.
Tehsil council chairman Shah Khalid Shinwari, who headed the five-member jirga, said that an organised group of smugglers were using those children as carriers for taking a variety of foreign and local items to both sides of the border, with some being used for drug trafficking.
Sources at the Torkham border told Dawn that most of those Afghan children, totaling 700-800, were involved in cross-border smuggling of various items, including cigarettes, soaps, chocolates and other imported items from Afghanistan and packed juice, sugar, jaggery and dairy products from Pakistan.
They said that those children were paid a handsome amount of Rs5,000-6,000 per trip by their handlers when they brought imported smuggled items from Afghanistan while they got Rs200-400 per trip from the Pakistani side.
Farman Shinwari, a former president of the Torkham Labourers and Daily Wagers Association, told Dawn that it was the lucrative nature of the cross border illegal trade, which lured the maximum number of very young Afghan children into the illegal and at times exploitative and risky activity.
He said that the Afghan border security guards had launched a crackdown on those children the Afghan Taliban seized power in Kabul in 2021, arrested a number of them and enrolled them in local schools and seminaries, but a majority of them “slipped away” and rejoined smuggler groups as most of them belonged to extremely poor families with no or very little sources of earning in Afghanistan.
Mr Shinwari said that most of those children hailed from families who had been evicted from their temporary homes at Bacha Maina on the Pakistan side of the border a few years ago, while the majority of those families had been involved in the illegal cross-border smuggling for decades.
Fameedullah, another Torkham labourer leader, told Dawn that those Afghan children would pretend as porters prior to the imposition of visa rule at Torkham in 2016, with a number of these children losing their lives while trying to hide themselves under moving vehicles in order to escape being arrested by border forces.
He said that prior to the imposition of visa rule, the number of these children ran in the thousands but that number had declined to a mere 700-800 after strict implementation of travel rules at Torkham.
Meanwhile, immigration authorities at Torkham on Monday allowed Afghan nationals with Tazkira (Afghan national identity cards) to go back to their country after six days of a frustrating wait.
Thousands of stranded Afghans with Tazkira thronged the Torkham border crossing on March 19 when a jirga negotiated the reopening of the border after remaining closed for 27 days.
However, authorities refused to allow them to cross the border due to a technical fault in the computerised immigration system, with those with valid visas in their passports given priority.
The stranded Tazkira-holding Afghans also held a brief demonstration at the border late on Sunday while also disrupting vehicular traffic for sometime. They agreed to end their protest after authorities declared that they would ‘soon’ be allowed to return to their country.
Though the final figure of the Afghans with Tazkira who have returned is not available, sources said a huge influx was seen at the immigration offices after midday on Monday when the immigration booths were opened to the jubilant Tazkira holders.
Published in Dawn, March 25th, 2025
