‘We lost everything twice’: Afghan returnees struggle after earthquake

Noorgal, Kunar, Afghanistan – Four months ago, Nawab Din returned to his home village of Wadir, high in the mountains of Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar province, after eight years as a refugee in Pakistan.

Today, he lives in a tent on his own farmland. His house was destroyed nearly three weeks ago by the earthquake^[1] that has shattered the lives of thousands of others in this region.

“We are living in tent camps now,” the 55-year-old farmer said, speaking at his cousin’s shop in the nearby village of Noorgal. “Our houses were old, and none were left standing … They were all destroyed by big boulders falling from the mountain during the earthquake.”

Din’s struggle captures the double disaster facing a huge number of Afghans. He is among more than four million people who have returned from Iran and Pakistan since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The August 31 earthquake killed about 2,200 people and destroyed more than 5,000 homes, compounding a widespread economic crisis.

“We lost everything we have worked for in Pakistan, and now we lost everything here,” Din adds.

Until four months ago, he had been living in Daska, a city in Pakistan’s Sialkot District, for eight years after fleeing his village in Afghanistan when ISIL (ISIS) fighters told him to join them or leave.

“I refused to join ISIL and I was forced to migrate to Pakistan,” he explains.

His exile ended abruptly this year as the Pakistani government continues its nationwide crackdown on undocumented foreign nationals^[2].

He describes how Pakistani police raided his house, taking him and his family to a camp to be processed for deportation. “I returned from Pakistan as we were told our time there was finished and we had to leave,” he says.

“We had to spend two nights at Torkham border crossing until we were registered by Afghan authorities, before we could return to our village.”

This struggle is echoed across Kunar. Some 12km from Noorgal, in the village of Barabat, 58-year-old Sadat Khan sits next to the rubble of the home he had been renting until the earthquake struck.

Khan returned from Pakistan willingly as his health was failing and he could no longer find work to support his wife and seven children. Now, the earthquake has taken what little he had left.

“I was poor in Pakistan as well. I was the only one working and my entire family was depending on me,” he tells Al Jazeera. “We don’t know where the next meal will come from. There is no work here. And I have problems with my lungs. I have trouble breathing if I do more effort.”

He says his request to local authorities for a tent for his family has so far gone unanswered.

“I went to the authorities to request a tent to install here,” he says. “We haven’t received anything, so I asked someone to give me a room for a while, for my children. My uncle had mercy on me and let me stay in one room in his house, now that the winter is coming^[3].”

One crisis out of many

The earthquake is only the most visible of the crises that returnees from Iran and Pakistan are facing.

“Our land is barren, and we have no stream or river close to the village,” says Din. “Our farming and our life depend entirely on rainfall, and we haven’t seen much of it lately. Other people wonder how can we live there with such severe water shortage.”

Dr Farida Safi, a nutritionist working at a field hospital set up by Islamic Relief in Diwa Gul valley after the quake, says malnutrition is becoming a major problem.

“Most of the people affected by the quake that come to us have food deficiency, mostly due to the poor diet and the lack of proper nutrition they had access to in their village,” she explains. “We have to treat many malnourished children.”

Kunar’s Governor, Mawlawi Qudratullah, told Al Jazeera that the Kunar authorities have started building a new town that will include 382 residential plots, according to the plan.

This initiative in Khas Kunar district is part of the national programmes directed by the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing, with an objective of providing permanent housing for Afghan returnees. However, it is unclear how long it will take to build these new homes or if farmland will also be given to returnees.

“It will be for those people who don’t have any land or house in this province,” Qudratullah said. “And this project has already started, separate from the crisis response to the earthquake.”

But for those living in or next to the ruins of their old homes, such promises feel distant. Back in Noorgal, Nawab Din is consumed by the immediate fear of aftershocks from the earthquake and the uncertainty of what comes next.

“I don’t know if the government will relocate us down in the plains or if they will help us rebuild,” he says, his voice heavy with exhaustion. “But I fear we might be forced to continue to live in a camp, even as aftershocks continue to hit, sometimes so powerful that the tents shake.”