ISLAMABAD, Nov 18: Some 300,000 Afghan refugees who voluntarily went to their homeland after the fall of the Taliban regime have returned to Pakistan, a foreign office spokesman said on Monday.

“Roughly 20 per cent of 1.5 million Afghan refugees who went home voluntarily have returned to Pakistan owing to difficult conditions in Afghanistan,” Aziz Ahmed Khan told a weekly news briefing in the federal capital.

Many of them opted to go to their homeland after the ruling Taliban were decimated in November last year by the coalition forces.

According to the United Nations figures more than 1.5 million Afghans returned home from Pakistan after the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) began to assist the voluntary repatriation in March last.

The UNHCR estimated that another 600,000 may return from Pakistan next year. But the refugees who were given 100 dollars a family by the UN agency when they left Pakistan got no assistance in Afghanistan.

Reports from Afghanistan said that some of them had repented leaving their country of exile - saying their living conditions were better there.

With winter setting in, the situation had worsened. The UNHCR had started delivering winter supplies to the most desperate of the returning refugees and internally displaced families.

The UNHCR estimated that up to 56,000 families would be at risk in the cold season. They comprised 260,000 internally displaced people and 290,000 returning refugees.—dpa