After a tribal jirga intervened, Pakistani officials sent 50 seized Afghan children back to Afghanistan via the Torkham border on ‘humanitarian’ grounds late Sunday evening.
Local police official Adnan Khan told that those children, including 17 females, were detained at Torkham border point after cutting the fence near the main border crossing after dusk and entering Pakistan.
Most youngsters were under 10 and had no travel documents, he said.
We sought to charge them under the 14 Foreign Act, but the local jirga members wanted them repatriated without legal action because they’re largely youngsters. The jirga opposed jailing the children, he claimed.
Move follows tribal jirga intervention.
Tehsil council chairman Shah Khalid Shinwari, who led the five-member jirga, said an organized group of smugglers were exploiting those minors to transport foreign and local goods across the border, including drugs.
Most of the 700-800 Afghan minors at the Torkham border smuggled cigarettes, soaps, chocolates, and other foreign commodities from Afghanistan and packed juice, sugar, jaggery, and dairy products from Pakistan, Dawn sources said.
They claimed that their handlers paid those minors Rs5,000-6,000 per trip to import contraband Afghan commodities and Rs200-400 per trip from Pakistan.
Former Torkham Labourers and Daily Wagers Association president Farman Shinwari told Dawn that the lucrative cross-border unlawful trade attracted the most young Afghan youngsters to the illegal, exploitative, and risky business.
He said that the Afghan border security guards had arrested a number of children after the Taliban took power in Kabul in 2021 and enrolled them in local schools and seminaries, but most of them “slipped away” and rejoined smuggler groups because they came from extremely poor families with no or few sources of income in Afghanistan.
Mr. Shinwari stated that most of those youngsters came from families who had been evicted from their temporary dwellings at Bacha Maina on the Pakistani side of the border a few years earlier and had been involved in illicit cross-border smuggling for decades.
Fameedullah, another Torkham laborer leader, told Dawn that Afghan children would pretend as porters before visa rule in 2016, with several dying while hiding under moving vehicles to avoid border forces.
He added that before visa requirements, thousands of these children entered Torkham, but now just 700-800 do.
After six stressful days, Torkham immigration authorities permitted Afghan nationals having Tazkira (Afghan national identity cards) to return home on Monday.
After 27 days of closure, a jirga reopened the Torkham border crossing on March 19, drawing thousands of Tazkira-afflicted Afghans.
Due to a computerized immigration system glitch, authorities denied them entry, prioritizing those with legitimate visas in their passports.
The stranded Tazkira-holding Afghans briefly demonstrated at the border late Sunday, impeding traffic. After officials said they might return home ‘soon’, they ended their demonstration.
The number of Afghans with Tazkira who returned is unknown, but sources reported a significant influx at the immigration offices around midday on Monday when the booths opened to the happy holders.
