Earthquake drives Afghan refugees home

Reports emerging from the Afghan/Iran border suggest thousands of Afghan refugees who lived in Bam, scene of Friday's destructive earthquake that killed an estimated 20,000 people, are heading home after having lost everything in the disaster. "We're getting reports from provincial authorities in Iran that many Afghans caught up in the quake have reached, or are making for the border, intending to repatriate to Afghanistan," Christopher Horwood, an official in the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan's (UMAMA) Herat office, told IRIN on Monday. Aid agencies estimate around 5,000 Afghans were resident in the southeastern Iranian city of Bam and that 90 percent of them were affected by the quake. According to the district governor of Farah province in western Afghanistan, from where the majority of Afghans in Bam hail, 145 of those Afghans who perished in the tragedy had already been buried in Iran and 220 corpses had arrived back from Iran with family members and been buried in the Qalay Kah district, Farah Province. Hundreds more bodies had already been delivered to the Afghan border for onward transport to families in Afghanistan at official as well as unofficial crossing points. UNAMA called an emergency Combined Disaster Management Team meeting Monday morning to develop a coordinated action plan between the UN's refugee agency UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the World Food Programme (WFP) to assist the increasing numbers of Afghans returning from the earthquake-affected areas of Kerman province. Although the estimate of Afghans affected - 4,500 - by the quake appears high, observers point out that the refugees would have been living in the poorest accommodation in Bam and could therefore have well suffered disproportionately in the devastating quake that levelled the majority of the city. "This really is a terrible event for the Afghans who left Afghanistan some years ago amid war and destruction and have tried to build a life in Iran. Now they return in winter with nothing and in many cases with dead relatives," Horwood said. By Monday, hope of finding any more survivors under the rubble had all but faded, with attention now being focused on the 20,000 injured and 70,000 people made homeless and destitute by the quake, according to figures from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).