Pakistan to launch new sweep for undocumented Afghans in Peshawar on Nov. 1

Pakistani authorities have finalized plans to launch a new, concentrated sweep for undocumented Afghan nationals in Peshawar starting November 1, according to a report published Tuesday by Dawn, Pakistan's oldest English-language newspaper. The operation, confirmed by government sources, is the latest escalation in a years-long campaign that has already pushed more than a million Afghans out of the country and shows no sign of winding down.

A door-to-door sweep across five sectors

Officials in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, of which Peshawar is the capital, have organized 120 special teams to carry out the operation, dividing the city into five administrative sectors to make the search more manageable, Dawn reported, citing government sources who spoke on Monday. The teams will draw on police, provincial security forces, the Federal Investigation Agency and federal intelligence units, and preparations were described as complete heading into the November 1 start date.

The report gives no figure for how many people are expected to be detained or removed from Peshawar specifically, and it does not identify any official by name. But it fits a pattern Pakistan has followed since mid-2026: provincial authorities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had already drawn up plans earlier this year to move roughly 20,000 Afghan families from Peshawar to a transit screening center before sending them onward to the Afghan border, part of what officials have called the final phase of the city's deportation drive.

A campaign already measured in the millions

The Peshawar operation is one piece of a much larger effort. Pakistan launched its Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan in late 2023 after announcing that undocumented foreigners, most of them Afghan, would be given a deadline to leave or face arrest and deportation. Pakistani officials, including Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, have said more than 2.4 million Afghans returned or were deported between September 2023 and mid-2026, a figure cited in a KabulNow report on the prime minister's World Refugee Day remarks.

International agencies put the overall scale even higher. The International Organization for Migration's 2026 Afghanistan crisis response plan estimates that returns from Pakistan and Iran combined amount to roughly 11 percent of Afghanistan's total population since 2023, including more than 2.8 million people in 2025 alone and over 324,000 in the first half of 2026. The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, tracks the flow in detail through a running series of weekly dashboards; its Afghan Returns update for Oct. 11–17, published Oct. 18, is the most recent in a series the agency has issued continuously through the fall documenting both voluntary departures and forced returns from Pakistan, broken down by age, gender and documentation status.

A UNHCR operational update filed in February with the UN's humanitarian information service, ReliefWeb, put cumulative returns since September 2023 at close to 3 million, a figure that is not directly comparable to the government's tally because the two sides count voluntary and coerced departures differently. Earlier this year, the agency estimated that roughly 1.6 million Afghans, including hundreds of thousands of registered refugees, remained in Pakistan, a population that has shrunk steadily as successive deadlines for different categories of Afghan residents have come and gone.

Families caught between two bureaucracies

The people affected by the Peshawar operation include both Afghans with no legal status in Pakistan and, by the accounts of Pakistani officials over the past year, families who have lived in the city for years or decades, in some cases since fleeing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Peshawar has historically held one of the largest concentrations of Afghans outside Afghanistan itself, and earlier phases of the deportation drive have relied on transit points such as the city's Nasir Bagh area before people are moved toward the Torkham border crossing into Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, one of the busiest and most heavily used crossings between the two countries.

Some Afghans facing removal have turned to Pakistan's courts; lawyers have filed petitions with the Peshawar High Court over the past year arguing that specific deportation orders should be set aside, though such challenges have generally not altered the broader trajectory of the campaign. Rights organizations, meanwhile, have repeatedly flagged conditions for people once they cross back into Afghanistan, where aid groups have described returnees arriving at the border with little shelter, food or access to clean water before being moved to their areas of origin.

Objections from Kabul, warnings from aid groups

Afghanistan's Taliban-run administration has periodically asked Pakistan to slow the pace of deportations and allow people to leave "with dignity," arguments Kabul has repeated through various channels since the campaign began, even as it continues to accept the returnees at the border. Pakistani officials have defended the drive as a matter of national security, pointing to a rise in militant attacks they attribute to fighters operating from Afghan soil — a charge the Taliban government denies — while independent analysts have also described the deportations as a form of pressure on Kabul to curb cross-border militancy.

Human rights organizations have separately warned that the pace and manner of the removals put people at risk. Groups including Human Rights Watch have argued for more than a year that conditions inside Afghanistan remain too unstable for mass forced returns to be considered safe, a concern raised again after Pakistan imposed successive 2025 deadlines on undocumented Afghans and holders of so-called Proof of Registration cards, according to reporting at the time by Euronews. Those warnings have done little to slow the broader campaign, which has continued through multiple rounds of border tension and, at times, armed clashes between Pakistani forces and the Taliban along the frontier.

What comes next

With the November 1 start date for the Peshawar sweep now set, the immediate question is how many people the newly formed teams will process in the operation's first days, and whether Kabul will again lodge formal objections once removals accelerate. Separate reporting on Pakistan's broader timeline has pointed to plans to move on the order of 20,000 Afghan residents of Peshawar through transit screening in the coming months, a figure consistent with the scale of recent provincial operations elsewhere in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including raids reported in Mansehra and Charsadda districts.

UNHCR's weekly reporting cycle means more precise numbers for the Peshawar operation are likely to surface within days of its launch, filling in detail that Tuesday's initial report from Dawn did not include, such as the identity of the officials overseeing the plan and any estimate of how many Afghans currently living in the city lack valid documentation. For now, the operation adds one more concentrated push to a deportation campaign that, three years after it began, has already reshaped the demographics of Pakistan's northwestern border region and strained Afghanistan's capacity to absorb those being sent back.