PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Pakistan on Saturday partially reopened the Torkham border crossing with Afghanistan to allow thousands of stranded Afghan refugees to return home, officials said.
All other cross-border movements, including trade, remain restricted. On October 12, Pakistan closed all Afghan border crossings due to deadly clashes in which both sides claimed to have killed dozens of troops. Hundreds of goods-transporting trucks and thousands of Afghan refugees were left stranded during the nearly three-week closure, which shut down important trade routes between the two nations. The reopening came after Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to maintain a ceasefire following nearly weeklong negotiations facilitated by Turkiye and Qatar aimed at preventing a wider conflict in the region.
Since the ceasefire along the Durand Line, a 2,611-kilometer (1,622-mile) border that Afghanistan has never formally recognized, authorities stated that no new firefights had occurred. While hundreds of Afghan refugees waited along the roadside for the crossing to reopen, thousands of them had been relocated to a temporary camp near the border. Trade across the frontier remains suspended on both sides despite the partial reopening. According to local officials on the Afghan side, the gate was reopened on Saturday morning solely for Afghan refugees, and thousands of people are anticipated to return to Afghanistan throughout the day. They urged all other travelers to refrain from using the crossing until further notice.
Local officials and Afghan soldiers were seen in a video released by the Information and Culture Department of Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province holding flowers at the Torkham gate to welcome refugees returning home. The development occurred a day after Ahmad Shakeeb, the ambassador of Afghanistan to Pakistan, wrote on X that Pakistan's closure of border crossings left many Afghan refugees stranded. On Friday, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Tahir Andrabi said the Afghan ambassador had violated diplomatic norms by airing his grievances on social media instead of communicating through Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry.
Pakistan has been conducting a campaign to expel immigrants who are living in the country illegally since 2023. As part of the effort, more than a million Afghans have been repatriated. Pakistan's military claimed earlier this month that it carried out airstrikes inside Afghanistan on the Pakistani Taliban's hideouts, resulting in the deaths of dozens of individuals it described as insurgents. According to Afghan officials, civilians were among the dead, and Afghan forces had struck Pakistani military posts in retaliation, killing 58 soldiers, negating the claim. Pakistan’s military acknowledged losing 23 troops in the fighting.
Qatar invited delegations from both sides to Doha as a result of the violence. In October, they agreed to a ceasefire 19. Six days of talks followed in Istanbul until Thursday night, when the two sides agreed to keep the truce in place. In recent months, the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, has claimed most of the attacks in Pakistan. The group, designated a terrorist organization by both the United States and the United Nations, is separate from the Afghan Taliban but has been emboldened by the Afghan group’s takeover of Kabul in 2021.
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