ISLAMABAD (Arab News) – Bahishta Ismail Khel, 13, was studying in the third grade and enjoying “a happy life” with her family in Kabul when the Taliban took over after the chaotic withdrawal of U.S.-led troops from the country after 20 years of occupation of the country in August last year, forcing her family to escape to Pakistan to flee the ensuing violence.
But life after entering Pakistan via Spin Boldak, a border town in Afghanistan, has been far from easy for the Khel family, currently squatting in a makeshift tent village in Islamabad’s posh F-6 sector — one of around 1,500 Afghan refugee families, comprising five to eight members each, camped in two parks in the capital for more than three months.
Most of the families do not want to live in Pakistan permanently and are hoping for Western embassies to process their immigration applications. In the meantime, they wait.
Pakistan is home to around 2.8 million Afghan refugees, including 1.5 million registered and 1.3 million unregistered Afghan nationals, according to the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR.
After the Taliban takeover of the war-battered country, some 250,000 additional Afghans took shelter in neighboring Pakistan.
“Here mosquitoes bite us at night, there is no food for us,” Khel told Arab News from inside a plastic tent. “I was going to school in Kabul and living a happy life. We fled after law and order deteriorated there.”
As she spoke, rain battered the roof of the flimsy shelter. Heavy rains have lashed the country in recent days, leaving large swathes of land inundated with water, and killing more than 430 people nationwide.
“I miss my friends and home,” Khel said, trying to hold back tears.
Many Afghans also fled their country after the Taliban closed girls’ schools in Afghanistan in March, hoping female members of their families could continue their education in Pakistan.
But it was only after arriving in Pakistani cities that they realized their children could not be admitted to Pakistan government-run schools without proper documents, while private institutions were too expensive for them to afford.
“One of my daughters has gotten mentally ill after the schools’ closure. They insist on going to school, but there is no facility for them (in Pakistan),” Basmina Sadaat, an Afghan mother-of-three, told Arab News. “What about their studies and future? We don’t have money to pay their fees (in private schools).”
Sadaat said her family left Kabul in March after the new Taliban authorities withheld the salary of her husband, an Afghan government employee.
“Our country is destroyed and isn’t livable now, but we have no identity here either.”
Many Afghan refugees have set up a protest camp outside the National Press Club in Islamabad and urged the UNHCR, the U.S., and other Western countries to grant them immigration for a better future.
“So far nobody from the embassy of any country has approached us for any sort of help,” Khel’s father, Aimal Ismail Khel, told Arab News.