GENEVA, Feb 15: A new and growing exodus of Afghans are fleeing their homes for Pakistan because of lack of security and aid, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said here on Friday.

As the UN agency gears up to help more than one million Afghans return home from Pakistan and Iran this year, its staff in Balochistan face a new wave of Afghans, spokesman Kris Janowksi said.

UNHCR staff at the border town of Chaman report that more than 10,000 people have now massed in “no man’s land” outside the Kili Faizo registration site and that more appear to be on their way.

“It essentially reflects the complexity of the situation in Afghanistan, with on the one hand, improvement and people going back, and on the other hand, still a huge security and lack of aid problem in some areas of the country,” he said while talking to reporters.

Banditry and alleged reprisals by rival ethnic groups have also prompted people to flee, Janowski said.

About half of them say they come from the Kandahar region and the rest are arriving from areas in northern Afghanistan, eg Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz.

“We have to reckon with the possibility that there will be more people coming across,” he said, adding that some 30,000 people had already been registered at new UNHCR camps in the Chaman region since Jan 1.

At the same time, UNHCR is getting ready to help up to 1.2 million Afghans who volunteer to return home from Pakistan and Iran this year.

However, the agency said it was not yet ready to start a large-scale organized repatriation because of the fragile security situation and continuing impact of drought and a devastated economy.

Nonetheless, more than 143,000 Afghans have returned home in the last six weeks under their own steam, UNHCR said.—AFP