The Taliban government said Saturday that Afghans who fled to Qatar fearing reprisals for their collaboration with U.S. forces can return home “with full confidence.”
US President Donald Trump's administration, which has made a widespread crackdown on immigration its signature policy, had set a March 31 deadline to close a camp housing more than 1,100 Afghans at a former US base in Qatar.
The Afghans have been passing through the base for processing as they seek to move to the United States, fearing persecution by Taliban authorities for having worked with American forces before they withdrew and the Western-backed government collapsed in 2021.
“According to media reports, a number of Afghan nationals who had been waiting for US visas in the State of Qatar have been asked to choose between repatriation to Afghanistan or resettlement to a third country,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Abdul Qahar Balkhi said in a statement published on X.
“Afghanistan constitutes the shared homeland of all Afghans and invites all concerned… (to) return to their homeland, the doors of which remain open to them, with full confidence and tranquility.”
AfghanEvac, a group seeking to help former Afghan allies, said this week that Washington had offered Afghans trapped in Qatar the option of emigrating to the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo or returning to their Taliban-ruled homeland.
“There is no relocation of vetted wartime allies, more than 400 of them children, from US custody to a country in the midst of its own collapse,” Shawn VanDiver, a US veteran who runs AfghanEvac, said in a statement.
More than 190,000 Afghans have found new homes in the United States thanks to a program started by former President Joe Biden.
Trump dismantled the broader U.S. refugee resettlement program and ordered a halt to processing for Afghans after an Afghan, who had worked with U.S. intelligence and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, shot two National Guard soldiers in Washington last year, one of them fatally.
A US State Department spokesperson said moving the Afghans in the Qatar camp “to a third country is a positive resolution that provides security for these remaining individuals to begin a new life outside of Afghanistan, while maintaining the security of the American people.”
The Taliban government's foreign ministry spokesman said in his statement on Saturday that “there are no security threats in Afghanistan.”
UN chief Antonio Guterres said in a report that between November 6 and January 25 there were “29 arbitrary arrests and detentions and six cases of torture and ill-treatment of former government officials” and former members of the security forces, “including those who have returned to Afghanistan.”
