Herat IDPs head for home

The voluntary repatriation of nearly 7,000 displaced Afghans from the Rawzabagh camp in Herat in the west has been completed, says the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

Jeff McMurdo, IOM programme co-ordinator for Afghanistan, told IRIN on Monday that only 65 families from a total of 7,000 people remained at the camp for internally displaced people (IDPs). Those who remained, he said, did not want to return to their homes and it was still unclear where they would resettle. For now, however, they were still being provided with shelter and food at the camp.

Rawzabagh is one of five IOM co-ordinated IDP camps in Herat, western Afghanistan. According to an IOM statement, more than 71,000 Afghans have returned to their homes from the camps in the past four months - 9,000 of them since the middle of June.

Those who have opted to return to their homes in time for the autumn planting season have been given survival kits including blankets, plastic sheets, some tools and seeds, and wheat to survive for up to three months.

The IOM said in a statement that an estimated 60,000 IDPs remained at the camps they run in Herat. Maslakh, the biggest IDP camp, still had 32,000 people living there, while another, Shaidayee, had 21,000, the organisation said.

McMurdo told IRIN that at one point, more than 200,000 displaced Afghans were housed at the IOM camps in Herat.

Even though the organisation plans on repatriating 10,000 more IDPs in the next two weeks, there is a small number of people still seeking shelter there. McMurdo said 65 families had arrived at the Maslakh camp last week, citing "protection issues" as their reason for seeking refuge. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is investigating their cases.

While many Afghans are opting to return to their homes, though, the IOM has suspended repatriation to Faryab and other northern provinces because of security concerns there.

In a related development, the UNHCR said in its latest update that 1,181,000 had returned to Afghanistan so far - almost 1.1 million from Pakistan, 90,000 from Iran and just over 9,000 from Tajikistan.

"The return rate for last week has averaged around 10,000-11,000 returnees per day," said UNHCR.