Taliban govt says Afghans in Qatar can return 'with full confidence'

KABUL: The Taliban government said on Saturday that Afghans who fled to Qatar, fearing reprisals over their collaboration with US forces, may return home “with full confidence”.

The administration of US President Donald Trump, which has made a sweeping crackdown on immigration a signature policy, had given a March 31 deadline to close a camp where more than 1,100 Afghans were staying at a former US base in Qatar.

Afghans have been going through the base for processing while seeking to move to the United States, fearing persecution by Taliban authorities for having worked with US forces before they withdrew and the Western-backed government collapsed in 2021.

“According to media reports, a number of Afghan nationals who had been awaiting US visas in the State of Qatar have been asked to choose between the repatriation to Afghanistan or resettlement in a third country,” foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi said in a statement posted on X.

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“Afghanistan constitutes the shared homeland of all Afghans & it invites all those concerned… (to) return to their homeland, whose doors remain open to them, with full confidence & peace of mind.”

‘No security threats’

AfghanEvac, a group seeking to help former Afghan allies, said this week that Washington had offered Afghans stuck in Qatar a choice between emigrating to the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo returning to their Taliban-ruled homeland.

“You do not relocate vetted wartime allies, more than 400 of them children, from American custody into a country in the middle of its own collapse,” Shawn VanDiver, a US veteran who heads AfghanEvac, said in a statement.

More than 190,000 Afghans have found new homes in the United States under a programme initiated by former president Joe Biden.

Trump has dismantled the broader US refugee resettlement programme and ordered a halt to processing for Afghans after one Afghan, who had worked with US intelligence and suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, shot two National Guard troops in Washington last year, one fatally.

A US State Department spokesperson said that moving Afghans at the Qatar camp “to a third country is a positive resolution that provides safety for these remaining people to start a new life outside of Afghanistan while upholding the safety and security of the American people”.

The Taliban government’s foreign ministry spokesman said in his Saturday statement that “there exist no security threats in Afghanistan”.

UN chief Antonio Guterres has said in a report that between November 6 and January 25, there were “29 arbitrary arrests and detentions and six instances of torture and ill-treatment of former government officials” and former members of the security forces, “including those who have returned to Afghanistan”.