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Pakistan partially reopened Torkham border crossing on Saturday afghanistan Thousands of stranded Afghan refugees should be allowed to return home, officials said.
Restrictions on all other cross-border movements, including trade, will continue.
Pakistan closed all border crossings with Afghanistan on October 12 after deadly clashes in which both sides claimed the deaths of dozens of soldiers.
The closure, which lasted nearly three weeks, left thousands of Afghan refugees stranded along with hundreds of trucks carrying goods, causing major trade routes between the two countries to be suspended.
It was reopened after Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to maintain the ceasefire after nearly week-long talks turkey And Queue Its aim is to prevent wider conflict in the region.
Officials said there were no new reports of firing since the ceasefire along the 2,611-kilometre (1,622-mile) border known as the Durand Line, which Afghanistan has never formally recognized.
Thousands of Afghan refugees were moved to a temporary camp near the border, while hundreds of others waited for roadside crossings to reopen. Despite partial reopening, cross-border trade remains suspended on both sides.
Local officials on the Afghan side told The Associated Press that the gate had reopened exclusively to Afghan refugees on Saturday morning, with thousands expected to flow back into Afghanistan throughout the day.
He urged all other travelers to refrain from using the crossing until further notice.
A video released by the Department of Information and Culture of Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province shows local officials and Afghan soldiers standing with flowers at the Torkham Gate to welcome refugees returning to their country.
The development comes a day after Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan, Ahmed Shakib, wrote on Twitter that a large number of Afghan refugees were stranded due to the closure of border crossings by Pakistan.
On Friday, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Tahir Andrabi said the Afghan ambassador had violated diplomatic norms by expressing his complaints on social media instead of communicating through Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry.
Pakistan has started a campaign to deport immigrants living illegally in the country from 2023. More than one million Afghans have been brought back under this effort.
Earlier this month, Pakistan’s military said it carried out air strikes on Pakistani Taliban positions inside Afghanistan, killing dozens of people it said were insurgents. Afghan officials denied the claim and said the dead included civilians, and said Afghan forces had retaliated by attacking Pakistani military posts, killing 58 soldiers. The Pakistan Army admitted to losing 23 soldiers in the fighting.
The violence prompted Qatar to invite delegations from both sides DohaWhere they agreed to an armistice on 19 October. This followed six days of talks in Istanbul that continued until Thursday night, when both sides agreed to maintain the ceasefire.
Pakistan has seen a sharp increase in terrorist attacks in recent months, with most responsibility claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. The group, which is designated a terrorist organization by both the United States and the United Nations, is separate from the Afghan Taliban but has been emboldened by the Afghan group’s capture of Kabul in 2021.