Pakistan struggles to cope with growing internal refugee crisis

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Mir Jalal, a farmer from a small village in Pakistan’s Khyber tribal area, never imagined he would have to flee his village amid bombs, mortar shells and gunfights — at least not again.

Jalal, 40, left his home in the village of Isoray, about 30 kilometers west of Peshawar, on foot on Nov. 7, walking for five hours with his family of eight to escape a military operation that has emptied much of the Khyber tribal area of its inhabitants.

“There were jets and helicopters and [armored vehicles] in my area,” he told Al Jazeera at the Jalozai refugee camp, about 30 kilometers southeast of Peshawar, where some of the displaced have sought refuge. “They were hitting everything at that time.

“We walked for five hours to get out. My whole family was with me. We had only the clothes on our backs. Helicopters came, and jets started flying overhead. It all started suddenly. So we decided we had to leave.”

Jalal is one of more than half a million internally displaced people (IDPs) to have fled the Khyber tribal area since a military operation began there in early October. It is a flood that the government and aid agencies have struggled to cope with, with the initial aid response marred by funding constraints and bureaucratic delays in registrations, according to IDPs and government officials.

The army — already engaged in a separate military operation, dubbed Zarb-e-Azb, in North Waziristan against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its allies, including Al-Qaeda affiliates — expanded the scope of its operations to include the Khyber tribal area in early October and claims to have killed more than 154 people in air and ground operations there.

The primary target in Khyber appears to be Lashkar-e-Islam (LeI), a TTP-affiliated group led by Mangal Bagh that has held influence — often outright control — over Khyber’s Tirah Valley since 2007. On Nov. 7, the TTP announced in a statement that it would be “formally joining hands” with LeI and would be sending fighters to aid the group in Khyber Agency.

The army claims to have killed more than 1,400 people — all designated terrorists — since June 15, when Zarb-e-Azb was launched. At least 95 soldiers have also been killed in these operations, according to the military’s press wing. Al Jazeera cannot independently verify those figures because access to the conflict area is tightly controlled by the military.

Those military operations have necessitated a major relocation of civilians from North Waziristan and Khyber. More than 1 million people have been forced out of their homes by operations in North Waziristan (622,487 people) and Khyber (521,661) since June, according to figures from Pakistan’s Federal Disaster Management Authority (FDMA). 

“Where we lived, they did not warn us before the operation. But after it started, a soldier came and told us not to sit together in one place,” said Fazle Wahab, 35, a driver from Nawai Qamar village in Khyber. “He said that if we were seen, we could be bombed by fighter jets [or mortars]. It was the fear of that that led us to leave there.”

He is living with 33 family members in a rented house in Peshawar, paying 20,000 rupees ($200) a month for five rooms, a princely sum for most from his impoverished area. While he is better off than other IDPs, he admits, the food rations being provided, he says, are still not enough to feed his family.

“The food aid is not enough. I need to buy more than these rations from the bazaar to feed my family. Today is the first time that I have received any food aid, and it has been 27 days since we came here. I was buying food out of my pocket.”

The FDMA, in partnership with the World Food Program and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), began distribution of food aid, which includes as its major components 80 kilos of wheat flour and 8 kilos of lentils, on Nov. 27 — 46 days after the first IDPs arrived from Khyber.

IDPs have been offered tents in the Jalozai camp, but so far only about 1,500 people have taken that option, according to FDMA figures. Most of the rest are either living with relatives or renting houses in Peshawar, officials said.

Aftab Ahmed, 31, from the village of Sipah Alamgodar, who just received this first packet of aid, said it was too little to feed his family of 15 and too late, insisting that his family “needs more from the government.”

His village, he said, was controlled by LeI fighters, but they “would not interfere with us.”

“When the firing started, people began to flee. So we also ran away. We didn’t know who was being fired at — whether it was the Taliban or anyone else … The Lashkar-e-Islam [fighters] were there in our village. They would say that we should offer namaz and keep a beard and stop listening to music and that women should not leave the house.”

Others, however, have not been as fortunate as Ahmed and Wahab when it comes to receiving aid.

“I have been here 25 days, and I have received nothing. I have a token, and today I have been told that I cannot get food at the food distribution point,” said Muhammad Khan, 19, a father of two from the Nala Bara area who says he, like many others, left his home with just the clothes on his back.

He is one of thousands who have been told their national identity cards are blocked, and hence cannot be used to access aid until further issues are resolved, according to Haji Naeem, an aid worker who works on IDP grievances in Peshawar.

Aid officials say the cases of genuine grievances are being dealt with as quickly as possible, with multiple complaint desks established at all food distribution and IDP registration points in Peshawar.

“The Khyber IDPs were already displaced [by previous military operations] in 2009 and 2010,” explains Farman Khilji, the director of the FDMA.

Many of those previously displaced had returned to their homes, he says, but had not registered as having done so, creating a situation in which the FDMA was unsure whether those presenting themselves to receive aid were newly displaced or had left their homes years earlier.

“Basically, more than 65,000 families [approximately 455,000 people] were already registered, and they were taking assistance, and that delayed our response a bit,” he says, adding that things did not go always go according to plan “because Pakistan is in a state of war”

Another FDMA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said that some of the FDMA’s contingency plans had failed, but that with the distribution beginning Nov. 27, the kinks appeared to have been worked out.

“The biggest challenge right now is that we have not received approvals for funding from the federal government yet. We have made requests to extend Jalozai and for other projects, but it has not been approved yet,” said the official. “Coordinating with humanitarian agencies has been challenging, but we have been able to work with the U.N. to convince them to facilitate this new influx of IDPs” despite the duplication of registration issues.

Khilji agreed that despite the fact there may have been double registration of some IDPs, “they were vulnerable and are vulnerable … For us they are again displaced.”

He said that his agency and others were struggling with funding constraints. “There are some funding issues as well. There is definitely less international support for IDPs. International U.N. agencies have supported us, as has the government of Pakistan, but the U.N. … has very little funding,” he said, pointing out that U.N. funds had been diverted to other crises, such as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

There is also a problem of scale, aid workers said, when dealing with an IDP crisis involving more than half a million people, most of whom left their homes with no supplies and are in immediate need of food, shelter and other support.

“It is difficult, of course, because of the scale of the crisis,” said Alif Gul, a UNHCR field official at a registration center in Peshawar. “But we do work on it, and there is no time limit. We work for as long as is needed … Assistance will continue, depending on the situation and as determined by the government.”

For those affected, the lack of a timeline for their displacement appears to be of prime concern, in terms of not only when they will return but also what kind of home they will go back to.

“We want to go home as quickly as possible. We cannot survive out here for too long,” said Wahab, adding that he wants the LeI’s influence in his area to end.

“We want Lashkar-e-Islam to be finished. They do not provide any services, just cruelty.”