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Afghans Fleeing To Pakistan To Escape Persecution: UNHCR
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| As well as fears for their safety, refugees said they had fled the country because of lack of food aid, says UNHCR. |
GENEVA, Jan. 30 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Thousands of Afghans have crossed into Pakistan in the past few days, most of them ethnic Pashtuns complaining of persecution, the U.N. refugee agency said.
Kris Janowski, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told a news briefing in Geneva that more than 3,500 Afghans had crossed at Chaman on the southeastern Afghan border.
"Some of them have been en route for a long time, even sometimes up to two months," Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted Janowski as telling reporters.
"These people are predominantly ethnic Pashtuns and they say that the reason why they're fleeing is persecution by various Northern Alliance groups and forces," he said. "They claim that they were persecuted because of being Pashtuns."
The new refugees are mainly from cities in northern Afghanistan such as Kunduz and Mazar-e-Sharif, as well as Herat in the west. Some also said they had come from Kandahar, UNHCR said.
As well as fears for their safety, some of the refugees also said they had fled the country because of lack of food aid, the U.N. refugee agency added.
UNHCR staff in Quetta, Pakistan, are planning cross-border missions into southern Afghanistan's Kandahar Province to hand out aid to help stabilize Afghans in their homeland.
However, security for humanitarian workers in many parts of the country is still a major problem, despite some recent improvements, according to Janowski.
The Geneva-based U.N. agency is currently running 13 new refugee camps in the area along the Afghan border in Pakistan where more than 150,000 Afghan refugees are living.
At the same time, about 3,000 people a day are returning under their own steam from Iran and Pakistan, bringing to 72,000 the total estimated number to have returned since the start of the year.
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