GENEVA: The United Nations said on Friday it had been bracing for a possible exodus from violence-ravaged Afghanistan of up to half 1,000,000 more refugees by the top of 2021.
The organisation said there currently wasn’t a flood of individuals fleeing across Afghanistan’s borders but added it had been laying contingency plans for that to vary because the country’s crisis deepens.
“The humanitarian emergency currently is inside Afghanistan,” Kelly Clements, the deputy diplomat of the UNHCR, told reporters.
But “this is obviously a really dynamic situation”, she said, explaining that the UNHCR was planning for a spread of various scenarios, including a mass exodus.
“We are preparing for around 500,000 new refugees in the region. This is a worst-case scenario,” she said.
She stressed especially the necessity to spice up support for neighbouring countries that already host quite 2.2m Afghan refugees, and which could soon see the fresh influx.
Even before the Taliban swept into power in Afghanistan nearly fortnight ago, the humanitarian situation within the country had deteriorated dramatically.
Half of the population was already in need of humanitarian assistance, and half of all children under five were estimated to be acutely malnourished.
The UN on Friday presented an idea for UN agencies and partner NGOs to organize for and answer the unfolding crisis within Afghanistan and in neighbouring countries.
It urgently appealed for nearly $300m to fund the plan. “We are appealing to all countries neighbouring Afghanistan to keep their borders open so that those seeking safety can find safety,” Clements said.
In particular, Iran and Pakistan, who together host 90 per cent of the Afghan refugees within the region, along side some three million other Afghans without refugee status, “will need a lot of support”, she said.
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