Tajik IDPs in Kabul move back to Shomali Plains

Thousands of Afghans living in the former Soviet compound in the capital Kabul, started to return home on Thursday, with help from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the UN refugee agency UNHCR.

The IDPs settled in the compound in 1999 after being forced from their homes on the Shomali Plains, 15 km north of the capital, by the Taliban. "These are all voluntary returns," Louis Hoffmann of IOM Afghanistan told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad on Friday.

Some 2,500 displaced people, making up a convoy of 19 buses and 13 trucks were transported to villages in the Qarabagh district of the Shomali Plains, he explained. There is a total of 15,700 people living in squalid conditions in the compound, according to a survey in December 2001 by the NGOs Save the Children and CARE.

The IDPs will return to some 16 districts in the Shomali Plains, Hoffman said. "We are planning to move 200 families per day over a period of 10 days to start with," he added. Most of the displaced are of Tajik ethnic background who were persecuted under Taliban rule.

Following the fall of the Taliban last November, some 8,000 Afghans this year returned from the former frontline in the Panjsheer Valley to the Shomali Plains, according to Hoffmann.

On arrival at the plains, UNHCR would provide the returnees with plastic sheeting, clothing, seeds and wheat. In time they would also recieve materials such as beams, doors and window frames to rebuild their homes, destroyed by the Taliban.

"We don't know what will happen to the compound after it is completely vacated, that is up to the authorities to decide," Hoffmann added.