ISLAMABAD, Nov 16: A government deadline for voluntary repatriation of 1.6 million registered Afghan refugees living in the country expires on Dec 31 this year, the National Assembly was informed on Friday.

The house was also informed that 1.649 million Afghan refugees were living in the country. Of them, only 0.608m lived in camps and the rest managed their affairs themselves.

Ms Tahira Aurangzeb of PML-N had sought the information during the question-answer session of the National Assembly.

The NA was informed that repatriation of registered Afghan refugees was guided by a tripartite agreement signed by governments of Pakistan, Afghanistan and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The agreement is called the Management and Repatriation Strategy for Afghan Refugees living in Pakistan for the year 2010-2012. The accord was approved by the cabinet on March 24, 2010, and is valid up to Dec 31, 2012.

In accordance with the agreement and policy in place, all registered Afghan refugees had been asked to leave the country voluntarily by the end of this year. According to the ministry, the agreement was currently under review and suggestions were being sought from parties concerned to determine the future course of action after the expiry of the agreement. When a new agreement is finalised it will be presented before the cabinet.

The National Assembly was also informed that most of the refugees —1.008m — lived in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, half of them in refugee camps and the rest on their own. In the KP, refugees are evenly spread out with a few cities sharing a major burden. For example, district Hangu has over 50,000 refugees, Haripur 98,000, Kohat 68,000, Nowshehra 99,000 and Peshawar 406,573.

Another 334,327 Afghans are living in various cities of Balochistan and most of them — 248,849 —outside the UNHCR camps.

In Balochistan, Quetta has maximum number of Afghan refugees —176,799 — followed by Pishin over 61,000, Killa Saifullah over 18,000, Killa Abdullah over 17,000 and Chaghai over 34,000.

Punjab hosts 181,803 refugees and only 14879 of them are in camps and the rest lived at places of their own choices. Their main concentration is in the district of Attock which has over 40,000 refugees, followed by Rawalpindi over 36,000, Mianwali over 31,000 and Chakwal over 26,000. Over 10,000 refugees are in Lahore.

Sindh has 68,326 refugees and all of them are outside camps. Most of them — over 40,000 — live in Karachi.

In Islamabad, 34,295 refugees live at various places on their own.

Federally Administrated Tribal Areas has only 15,000 refugees of whom 2,000 live in camps and 12,000 outside camps. Over 6,000 refugees live in Azad Kashmir and all of them live on their own.