KABUL, Nov 3: More than 276,000 Afghan refugees have returned to their troubled homeland this year, most of them from Pakistan, under a voluntary repatriation programme, the UN refugee agency said on Monday.

The programme, which has wrapped up for the year ahead of winter, is the largest in the world with over five million Afghans coming home since 2002 after the fall of the extremist Taliban regime.

“The official figure for returnees to Afghanistan this year from Pakistan, Iran and what we call non-neighbouring countries is 276,700,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees official Ewen McLeod told reporters.

“Ninety-nine per cent of them have returned from Pakistan,” the organisation’s acting representative in Kabul said. Most of the others had come from Iran.The returns since 2002 represented a roughly 20 per cent increase in the population of Afghanistan with the number of people living in Kabul up three times to 4.5 million, McLeod said, adding it was a burden on the nation.

“These figures would be a sharp challenge for even western industrialised countries,” he said.

Nearly two-thirds of the returnees had set up in provinces in the east of the country, near the border with Pakistan, while about 12 per cent were in Kabul. There were still about 2.7 million Afghans registered as refugees in Pakistan and Iran, McLeod said.

Afghanistan’s unemployment rate is estimated to be at least 30 per cent and thousands of young men enter Iran and Pakistan illegally every year in search of work.—AFP