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Published 17 Nov, 2017 07:41pm

370,000 Afghan refugees registered in four months: report

The National Database Registration Authority (Nadra) has registered 370,000 un-documented Afghan refugees across the country over the last four months, Radio Pakistan, the state-run broadcaster, reported on Friday.

The authority has expedited the registration process of un-documented Afghan refugees, a Nadra spokesman was quoted as saying.

The largest number of refugees were registered in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. According to the report, 230,000 refugees were registered in KP alone.

The authority is aiming to register a million Afghan refugees, which its officials say will be done by January 16, 2018. Earlier, the campaign was supposed to end on Dec 31, 2017.

A total of 21 registration centres have been set up in the country, including 11 in KP.

Nadra, the Afghan Commissionerate and the Afghanistan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation are jointly running the registration campaign.

The country has some 1.5 million registered refugees, one of the largest such populations in the world, according to the UN's refugee agency (UNHCR). More than a million others are estimated to live here unregistered.

The country’s law-enforcement agencies had launched a crackdown on unregistered Afghans in the aftermath of a series of terrorist attacks in the country.

The International Organisation of Migration, which assists and monitors the movement of migrants across the world, reported that 248,189 undocumented Afghan nationals had returned or were deported from Pakistan in 2016.

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