A group of ethnic Kyrgyz from Afghan Pamirs who fled into Tajikistan last Tuesday and Wednesday due to threat from the Taliban have returned to Afghanistan.
The press center of the Main Border Guard Directorate of the State Committee for National Security of Tajikistan says 345 ethnic Kyrgyz, residents of Andemin village in Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, who fled into Tajikistan on July 13 and 14 returned to Afghanistan on July 17 and 18 with their 4,000 head of livestock and vehicles.
The refugees reportedly returned after the Afghan government guaranteed their personal safety.
Recall, ethnic Kyrgyz refugees from Afghan Pamirs crossed the Afghan-Tajik border into Qizil-Art jamoat of Murgab district in the Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO) on July 13 and 14.
Tajik border guards reportedly admitted the fleeing people out of a sense of “humanism and good neighborliness.”
According to some sources, today's Pamir Kyrgyz in the Wakhan Corridor are descendants of the nomadic herders who sought safety there in 1916. So they adapted their pastoral nomadic structure to a much more constrained environment, living in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan full time.
