3.5 Million Displaced: Afghanistan's Internal Refugee Crisis

A Crisis Within a Crisis

Afghanistan is simultaneously experiencing one of the world's most severe food crises, one of the world's worst economic collapses, and one of the world's largest displacement crises — each feeding into and amplifying the others. UNHCR estimates approximately 3.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Afghanistan — people who have been forced from their homes and communities but remain within Afghanistan's borders. They are joined by hundreds of thousands of returnees arriving annually from Pakistan, Iran, and other countries — many deported against their will, many arriving with nothing in a country they may barely recognize.

Together, these displaced populations represent one of the world's largest and most complex humanitarian emergencies. Yet they receive far less international attention than displacement crises in other parts of the world. Afghans are displaced, hungry, and largely invisible to global media and public opinion.

Who Are Afghanistan's IDPs?

Afghanistan's 3.5 million IDPs are not a homogeneous population — they include multiple overlapping categories of displaced people with different histories, needs, and vulnerabilities.

Conflict-displaced IDPs are communities that fled active fighting — military operations, armed group violence, targeted attacks — and have not been able to return because the security situation in their home communities remains too dangerous. Many of these families have been displaced for years or even decades, having fled in waves of conflict going back to the Soviet invasion period, the civil wars of the 1990s, and the NATO-era operations from 2001 onwards. They have lost not just their homes but their land, their livestock, their social networks, and often their sense of identity and belonging.

Drought-displaced IDPs fled not from violence but from the collapse of their agricultural livelihoods under the 2018–2022 mega-drought. When their wells dried up, their livestock died, and their crops failed for two or three consecutive seasons, there was nothing left in the village — no water, no food, no income, no prospect of survival. They left for cities and district centers, settling in informal settlements on the urban fringe, hoping to find wage labor and food. Many found neither.

Economically displaced IDPs are a relatively new category whose numbers have grown sharply since 2021. The economic collapse has forced families from rural communities — where subsistence agriculture had provided a minimal but adequate livelihood — to urban areas in search of wage labor, food distribution, and services. They are economic migrants within their own country, and they often find that the urban areas they have migrated to are themselves overwhelmed by the same economic crisis that drove them to leave.

Returnee IDPs are Afghans who lived as refugees in Pakistan, Iran, or other countries and have returned — either voluntarily or under deportation pressure — to find that the Afghanistan they left no longer exists in any recognizable form. They return to destroyed or occupied homes, to communities where their social networks have dispersed, to an economy that has no room for them, and to political conditions they may never have experienced directly.

Life in Displacement: The Human Reality

IDP settlements on the edges of Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, and other Afghan cities are places of profound human suffering. Families of 8–12 people live in single-room mud shelters or makeshift structures covered with plastic sheeting. There is no running water — women and children carry water from distant standpipes or pay water sellers at prices many cannot afford. There are no latrines — people defecate in the open, contaminating the soil and any water sources nearby. There are no schools within reach — children who should be studying are instead working, begging, or helping to collect water and firewood. There is almost no healthcare — the nearest clinic may be kilometers away, and even if it is accessible, most IDP families cannot afford medicines or transport costs for referral to hospital.

IDP children are among Afghanistan's most educationally disadvantaged. They move too frequently for stable school enrollment. Their families are too poor to cover even nominal school costs. Their labor is often needed to supplement household income. Girls face particular barriers: they are often kept home to maintain modesty in densely populated settlements where privacy is impossible, and to protect them from the safety risks of traveling to distant schools through unfamiliar areas.

IDP women face extraordinary vulnerability. In displacement, the social protection networks — family, community, tribal structures — that normally provide a degree of security and support are absent or attenuated. Women who do not have reliable male protection are at elevated risk of gender-based violence, exploitation, and abuse. Female-headed IDP households — a large proportion of the total, given male mortality in conflict and male migration for work — have almost no support systems. ACRU specifically prioritizes female-headed households in all IDP-related programming.

The Pakistan Deportation Crisis

Pakistan hosts approximately 1.3–1.4 million registered Afghan refugees and an estimated 3–4 million total Afghans — many of whom have lived in Pakistan for decades, in some cases for their entire lives. Since October 2023, Pakistan has conducted large-scale deportation operations targeting undocumented Afghans, forcing hundreds of thousands of people across the border in a matter of months. Many of those deported have no meaningful connection to Afghanistan — they were born in Pakistan, they speak Urdu as their first language, they have children who are Pakistani citizens. Yet they have been forced to a country they barely know, with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

The scale of deportation returns is staggering: UNHCR documented over 500,000 Afghans crossing from Pakistan to Afghanistan in the final months of 2023 alone. The Afghan humanitarian system — already overwhelmed — had no capacity to absorb this influx. Returnee families arrived at border crossings with nowhere to go, no housing, no food, no cash, and no relatives in the areas where they were arriving. Many had left Afghanistan as infants or small children and had no network, no knowledge of local conditions, and no understanding of how to navigate the systems that might provide them assistance.

ACRU responded to the Logar Province returnee crisis through a PWJ/JPF-funded Emergency Humanitarian Assistance program ($163,734) in Mohammad Agha, Pule Alam, and Khoshi districts — providing emergency food packages, NFI kits, and cash assistance to returning families during their most acute period of need. But this represents a fraction of what is needed across all the provinces receiving returnees.

The Afghan Diaspora: Loss and Potential

UNHCR estimates approximately 2.7 million registered Afghan refugees abroad — in Pakistan, Iran, Europe, Australia, and North America — with total Afghans outside Afghanistan (including unregistered and those with regularized status) estimated at 5–6 million. This massive diaspora represents a complex mixture of loss and potential for Afghanistan.

The loss is obvious: every Afghan professional who has emigrated represents a deduction from Afghanistan's future. The doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers, IT professionals, and entrepreneurs who have left cannot serve Afghanistan's communities, build Afghanistan's institutions, or develop Afghanistan's economy from abroad. Their departure weakens every sector they leave behind.

The potential is less often recognized but equally real. Afghan diaspora communities have maintained their connection to their homeland. They send remittances — formal and informal — that keep families alive. They maintain cultural and linguistic ties. They hold expertise that will be urgently needed when conditions allow them to return or contribute remotely. They are advocates for their country in countries where Afghanistan would otherwise have no voice. And some — the most resilient and most committed — are already finding ways to contribute remotely, supporting Afghan businesses, funding community projects, and maintaining connections with organizations like ACRU that are serving their communities from within.

IDP Hosting Communities Under Pressure

Displacement does not only harm the displaced — it also places severe strain on the communities that host them. When hundreds of thousands of IDPs settle on the edges of Afghan cities, they compete with host community residents for wage labor, for water, for market space, and for access to aid programs. They increase demand on schools and health facilities that were already inadequate for the existing population. They drive up rents. They sometimes bring social tensions — particularly when IDPs are from different ethnic, linguistic, or tribal backgrounds than host community residents.

ACRU's programs in displacement-affected areas deliberately serve both IDPs and host community members — recognizing that sustainable humanitarian response cannot benefit one group at the expense of another, and that building relationships between displaced and host communities is itself a conflict prevention and social cohesion intervention.

ACRU's Displacement Response

ACRU has worked with displaced populations since our founding in 1991 — through every wave of conflict and displacement that has affected Afghanistan across three decades. Our approach combines emergency response with durable solutions programming.

On emergency response: ACRU registers IDP and returnee households for food and NFI assistance, prioritizing female-headed households, the disabled, the elderly, and families with many dependents. We conduct household verification to ensure that distribution reaches genuine IDPs and is not captured by local power structures. We implement post-distribution monitoring to verify that assistance arrived in full and with dignity. Our WFP, PWJ/JPF, and UNHCR emergency programs have collectively reached tens of thousands of displaced Afghans across Logar, Herat, Paktika, and other provinces.

On durable solutions: ACRU recognizes that emergency food distribution alone does not resolve displacement — it sustains life while more fundamental solutions are pursued. Our livelihoods programs train displaced adults in marketable skills, helping them build economic independence that does not depend on continued aid. Our civic education programs build community management capacity in IDP settlements. Our WASH programs improve water and sanitation conditions in informal settlements. Our school rehabilitation work creates learning environments that both IDP and host community children can access.

"Every displaced person we meet has a story that should be told and heard. A farmer from Badghis who lost his land to drought after his family had farmed it for six generations. A teacher from Kunduz who walked for three days with her children after her school was destroyed. A carpenter from Nangarhar who now earns fifty afghani a day as a day laborer, half of what he needs to feed his family. These are not statistics — they are people, with histories, with dignity, and with the right to be more than victims." — ACRU Field Coordinator, Kabul

What Must Change

Afghanistan's displacement crisis will not resolve without a combination of political, humanitarian, and development interventions that the international community has not yet deployed at sufficient scale. ACRU advocates for: sustained, adequate funding for IDP and returnee assistance programs across all affected provinces; pressure on Pakistan and Iran to respect the rights of Afghan refugees and to pursue durable solutions rather than mass deportation; investment in the conditions that allow IDPs to return home safely — including security, reconstruction, and economic recovery in displaced persons' places of origin; and support for community-based organizations like ACRU that have the local knowledge, community trust, and operational capacity to reach displaced populations in the most challenging environments.