Russia’s war against Ukraine has resulted in more than 4 million Ukrainian refugees fleeing the country.

The United States said on March 24, 2022, that it would welcome 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.

The Ukrainian refugee situation continues to overshadow another refugee crisis. That crisis stems from the U.S. military’s official withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.

Since the withdrawal, approximately 84,600 Afghans were evacuated to the U.S.

It is estimated that thousands of Afghans vulnerable to the Taliban have been left behind.

“There are still Afghans being killed by the Taliban because we haven’t gotten them out of the country,” U.S. Congressman Seth Moulton said on March 28.

As a scholar of refugees and post-conflict reconstruction, I believe that the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan will continue to result in rising numbers of refugees in the years to come.

A hasty retreat

Prior to the U.S. military withdrawal, Afghanistan produced the second-largest number of refugees in the world, topping 2.6 million. The largest refugee crisis comes from 11 years of war in Syria.

Following the Soviet Union invasion in 1979, the majority of Afghan refugees have fled to Iran and Pakistan. Since then, ongoing civil war and violence as well as the U.S. invasion in 2001 prompted more people to seek refuge in these countries.

As humanitarian needs in Afghanistan now grow, Afghans continue to cross into these countries.

The U.S. evacuation of Afghan refugees in 2021 was the largest evacuation effort in U.S. history since the 1975 Operation New Life, when 110,000 Vietnamese refugees were evacuated to Guam after the fall of Saigon.

President Biden called the Afghan evacuations an “extraordinary success.”

But there was bipartisan condemnation in Congress of the hasty nature of the withdrawal and evacuations, which resulted in many Afghans and some American citizens being left behind.

Read full story at The Conversation:
https://theconversation.com/afghan-evacuees-lack-a-clear-path-for-resettlement-in-the-u-s-7-months-after-taliban-takeover-176945

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