The elderly grimace, hobbling on crutches, and wide-eyed children stare, cradling chickens carried from homes they were forced to leave behind. "It feels good to be in my own country," 35-year-old Nazia says, just minutes after she crosses from Pakistan, where she was born, into Afghanistan. The Torkham crossing, known as "Zero Point", is where one hard life ends and another begins.
"But I've never been to Afghanistan before and many people here don't even have enough bread to eat," Nazia sighs as she heads, two of her children in tow, toward registration counters festooned with white and black Taliban flags. Nearly her entire family, eight sisters and their offspring, were deported to Afghanistan this year from Pakistan or Iran. They are part of the biggest cross-border movement of people anywhere in the world.
Millions of Afghans have fled across the borders to Pakistan and Iran for decades – seeking refuge or employment - and the number escaping Afghanistan has continued to rise since the Taliban takeover in August 2021. Most are now being forced to return as these two neighbours crack down on undocumented migrants. Nazia and her family were undocumented but the UN and human rights groups say the security sweep is reaching far beyond that group to include registered Afghans too.
Even Pakistan now publicly says that Afghans with Proof of Registration cards are not exempt. The expulsions show no sign of stopping. The number forced to return this year from Pakistan and Iran has already reached another million, according to the UN's Refugee Agency, the UNHCR.
"In a little under three years, we've seen six million people, a population that is itself the size of a small country, come back to Afghanistan," observes Charlie Goodlake, spokesperson for the UNHCR in Afghanistan. "We've never seen in recent history a return movement on this scale," he underlines, standing in the baking heat in the tented village close to the border. It's a desolate landscape of tarpaulin and plastic shelters, many now tattered and torn, erected by the UN and other aid agencies to provide refuge for a few nights for a people arriving with nowhere to go.
Many returnees have not set foot in Afghanistan for decades; many like Nazia have never been here at all. "I left 45 years ago during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and most of my brothers were born in Pakistan," explains Sarwar, who arrived a few days earlier with seven brothers and their families in a convoy of 40 people and the jumble of their worldly goods packed into a lumbering Pakistani lorry. "We spent a long time there, so of course I felt heartbroken when they forced us out of our home," he says.
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