KABUL: The international community should find ways to support millions of Afghans sent back from Iran and Pakistan or risk a rise in radicalisation and security threats, the head of the UN refugee agency told AFP on Wednesday.
“With these returnees, you have literally hundreds of thousands of young people who are essentially without jobs,” said Barham Salih, the United Nations´ High Commissioner for Refugees.
“These people should be helped to reintegrate back into their communities, hopefully with meaningful jobs that can make them self-reliant,” he said in an interview during a visit to Kabul.
“The alternative is radicalisation; the alternative is social problems, security problems, and contemporary history tells us problems in Afghanistan do not stay here. It goes to the neighbourhood and far beyond as well.”
More than six million Afghans have had to return from Pakistan and Iran since September 2023 after their host countries tightened migration policies.
Another two million Afghans are expected to be pushed back this year in what the United Nations calls one of the largest population repatriation movements globally.
The returnees are pushed back to a country scarred by decades of war and in the grips of a humanitarian crisis, with more than 17 million people in Afghanistan in need of urgent assistance.
Women face particular challenges since the Taliban authorities returned to power in 2021, being excluded from many jobs and aspects of public life.
More than 90 percent of Afghans back from Iran and Pakistan are “unable to meet their basic needs”, the UN mission in Afghanistan said in a statement Wednesday.
“In provinces receiving large numbers of returnees, only 3 percent have formal employment,” it added.
The UN refugee agency, which assists returning men, women and children with finding employment, housing and healthcare, needs $200 million to support them, Salih said.
“We have secured $60 million so far,” Salih told AFP.
“We hope by the end of the year this will increase to about $100 million. It´s still significantly short of what is needed, given the scale of the humanitarian assistance.
“We cannot afford to ignore the plight of the people of Afghanistan, morally, from a humanitarian point of view, and I dare say from a security and a political interest point of view as well.”
At a time when several governments have drastically reduced their aid funds to Afghanistan, Salih warned that “the price of inaction and indifference could be far, far greater than the price of action”.
Salih, who on Monday visited a factory in Mazar-i-Sharif employing many returnees including women, reiterated his call for Afghan authorities to lift restrictions affecting women.
The Taliban authorities have closed high schools and universities to women and girls over the age of around 12, and banned them from working in certain professions and going to parks.
Since September 2025, the Taliban government has also banned women from working in United Nations offices, a measure repeatedly condemned by the world body.
“In our conversations with the de facto authorities here we were very clear that there are restrictions on women and girls that really cannot be useful, cannot allow us to deliver,” Salih told AFP.
“You cannot help people by marginalising half of society,” he said.
In talks with Taliban officials on Wednesday, “we were told that they are looking at the situation, the requests that we have made, and they are reviewing the situation”, Salih said.
