The Taliban terrorist organization claims that more than 5 million Afghans have come home since the fall of the U.S.-backed government in the country, Afghanistan’s Tolo News reported on Sunday.
The news follows months of large-scale deportations of Afghan nationals from neighboring countries, most prominently Pakistan and Iran – operations that have been reportedly much more successful at repatriating Afghan nationals than Taliban assurances that the country is safe for their return.
The Taliban has been the uncontested government of Afghanistan since August 15, 2021, when its terrorists entered the capital city of Kabul and prompted then-President Ashraf Ghani to flee the country. The Taliban had ruled Afghanistan for much of the 1990s and lost control of the country in the aftermath of the American invasion of the country in September 2001. Taliban jihadists fought the Americans and the U.S.-backed government of Afghanistan for 20 years.
The last government collapsed after former President Joe Biden announced in April 2021 that he would not respect an agreement brokered under President Donald Trump to withdraw U.S. troops by May of that year, extending the already 20-year-old war. As a result, the Taliban waged a war of conquest in which tens of thousands of attacks sent the remnants of the former Afghan military fleeing into neighboring states and set the table for the fall of Kabul.
The aftermath of the fall of Kabul also resulted in thousands, if not millions, of Afghans scrambling to flee their country. Within Afghanistan, the United Nations International Organization of Migration (IOM) estimates that over 6 million Afghans remain internally displaced.
According to Tolo, the Taliban “ministry of refugees” has documented the return of 5.097 million Afghan citizens between August 2021, when the jihadists took over the country, to May 2025.
“Abdul Mutalib Haqqani, the spokesperson for the ministry, added that in the past two months of the current calendar year, 268,000 Afghans have returned from Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey,” the outlet relayed.
The Taliban has been claiming high numbers of returnees for years, though it has documented a significant uptick in the return of its citizens in the past year. In August 2024, Taliban officials claimed that they had documented 3.7 million Afghans coming home since their return to power; the IOM estimated at the time that nearly 8 million had left.
The migration does not appear to be voluntary. In the past year, Pakistan and Iran have enacted massive deportation operations to remove Afghans from their territories, in several instances outraging the Taliban regime, which does not have the resources to resettle many of these people. The Taliban confirmed the most recent wave of such deportations on Saturday, stating that 4,602 people had been processed and granted entry as Afghan citizens from border check points with Pakistan and Iran. The Taliban-run Bakhtar News Agency claimed that the regime offered the migrants “SIM cards and cash assistance to help ease their transition.”
That repatriation follows the return of as many as 1.5 million Afghan citizens, the IOM estimated in May, many of whom are difficult to resettle as they have no proper documentation and cannot adequately explain their legal situation. The organization identified more than 265,000 returned Afghans between January and April 2025 who had no documentation to process their return. Many of these are among the 6 million who the IOM has identified as internally displaced; an estimated 75 percent were forced to return home.
“The large part of the people who are returning to Afghanistan are in a state of great vulnerability,” IOM Deputy Director General of Operations Ugochi Daniels stated in May, “having been forced to leave and abandon their homes, belongings, and workplaces.”
The government of Pakistan created an especially chaotic situation along its border with Afghanistan in October 2023 when it abruptly announced that it would no longer harbor Afghan refugees, ordering nearly 2 million people to leave the country in a month. Pakistan and Iran both have been accused of opening fire on desperate Afghan civilians trying to escape the Taliban’s wrath, killing an estimated dozens.
Taliban officials enthusiastically condemned the Pakistan expulsion at the time.
“The Pakistani side should reconsider its plan. Afghan refugees are not involved in Pakistan’s security problems. As long as they leave Pakistan voluntarily, that country should tolerate them,” Taliban top spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said at the time, calling the announcement “unacceptable.”
Pakistan has since mended fences with the Taliban and elevated the status of its diplomatic outpost in Kabul. Taliban “foreign minister” Amir Khan Muttaqi praised his Pakistani counterparts on Sunday for the “positive move” and expressed “optimism” that their relationship would continue to improve.
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