Six million forced to return to Afghanistan since 2023

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1:33Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. Coming to you live from London, I'm Rajini Vaidyanathan. We begin the programme with a special report on the plight of the many thousands of Afghans who've left the country, crossing into neighbouring Pakistan and Iran, seeking refuge or employment in what's one of the biggest cross-border movements anywhere in the world. In recent years, as the numbers leaving Afghanistan have risen, so have deportation efforts by Pakistan and Iran. More than 6 million Afghans have been sent back to their home country since around 2023. Many fear the risks of going back to a country now led by the Taliban.

2:12Our chief international correspondent, Lise Doucette, has just been visiting the main border crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan at Torkum and heard stories from many Afghans who are fearing deportation. She's been telling me more. Yes, what a stark reminder, Rajini, of how far Afghanistan has fallen under the world's radar. This was the country which was at the top of the intray for foreign ministers the world over, the highest percentage of aid per capita in any country in the world. And now over the past three years, you've had a staggering six million people. That's the size of a small or a medium-sized country going into another country that is already reeling from multiple crises, being slammed by climate change, steep cuts in foreign aid.

3:00And of course, for the women and girls who are leaving Pakistan and Iran, it means they're going to a place where they're not going to be able to continue their education. Both Pakistan and Iran say it's past time for them to go home. So we went to the main border crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan at Torkham to see what it's like there.

3:23They call this Zero Point. It's the main crossing between Pakistan, about 50 metres away, and Afghanistan. And there's a tide of Afghan families coming through these metal gates. A woman with a goat on a rope, a man with a huge suitcase on his head, and three little girls, each of them carrying a rooster or a chicken. entire families, many generations who've grown up on the other side, spending decades there and coming back to a country many have never even been to before.

4:05The journey was very difficult. My husband had been deported 20 days earlier and I had to borrow money from several people to make the journey. I have never been to Afghanistan before. What do you say to the Pakistanis? We spent many good years there and lived well, but this year the Pakistanis caused us a great deal of hardship. They would not allow my husband to work. There was work available, but he was afraid to go because the police might arrest him. Every Afghan family we speak with speaks about being mistreated by the Pakistanis. We can't confirm that right here. But Pakistan has been saying that it's given refuge to millions of Afghans for decades, through all of its wars, and it's time for the Afghans to go home.

5:03We're looking into this makeshift office, Taliban flags everywhere. Then from here, those who have documents can go on to the United Nations, and then they'll be given a refuge, human hopes for just a few days, in a tented village nearby.

5:22Assalamu alaikum. Assalamu alaikum. Namah ta 'an, chief. What's your name? My name is Sabir. How many in your family have been forced to come back to Afghanistan? I have seven brothers, my sister-in-law, their children, my children, all of us. And what about your future? Can you start over again here? The problem here is that there are no business or job opportunities in Afghanistan these days. However, I will do whatever work I can find. And some of you, are you worried that some of your daughters, some of your nieces won't be able to go to school in Afghanistan? Of course I am worried. They need an education.

6:03They should have the opportunity to become doctors, engineers or whatever they choose to be in the future. Here they have no option but to stay at home with nothing to do. Over the past three years, more than six million Afghans have been forced to come home in circumstances like this, either from Pakistan or from Iran on the other border. But forcing people to go home is a violation of international principles. Charlie Goodlake is the spokesperson in Kabul for the United Nations Refugee Agency, the UNHCR. We haven't seen returns on this level anywhere in the world in recent history. This is almost a medium-sized country that is coming back to Afghanistan and having to reintegrate and to reabsorb.

6:48The Taliban authorities are facing crises of their own. Could they do this, respond to the needs of these people on their own? I do not believe that they can do this. I don't think there's many countries in the world that could receive 6 million people on their own. But let me be also very clear, we're also here to raise challenges with them, where we have disagreements, and those are on very clear issues about girls going back to school, about our national staff being able to come back to UN offices. We're heading now to see someone who was deported twice. He's not just worried about being here, he's terrified.

7:25He used to police the streets for the government ousted by the Taliban. We can't reveal his location, his identity.

7:37Tell me what your life is like now. I feel that my life is under threat and I can't even go outside. I spent all my day at home. The Taliban authorities have offered an amnesty. You don't believe them? I do not believe in their amnesty at all. I have no trust in it because many of my friends were killed. Did you try to find a way out? I tried, but I do not know where I can go. I'm afraid to travel because something might happen to me, God forbid. I live with these fears all the time.

8:24The biggest forced return in the world shows no sign of stopping, and a world preoccupied by so many other crises seems to take little notice.

8:39Lise is still with me, and Lise, all of this comes just over five years since the Taliban took power back in Afghanistan. And one of the hallmarks of their return has been severe restrictions on the lives of women and girls. You've been speaking to Afghanistan's Taliban foreign minister, haven't you? That must be the starkest symbol of five years of Taliban rule, the sight of school children, school girls not being allowed to go to the classroom. That's the only country in the world where girls cannot be educated past primary school, where women cannot go to university. And it is one of the main obstacles to a better relationship and to indeed formal recognition by most countries around the world.

9:18Only one country, Russia, has formally recognised the Taliban. Many others, including China and India, other of Afghanistan's neighbours, Central Asian states, do have their embassies open, have accredited ambassadors, are doing deals in minerals and rare earth elements. So in effect, it's de facto recognition. But the Taliban do want their seat at the United Nations. And it does also this isolation, if you like, relative isolation from the West is having an impact on the kind of money, the kind of funds they need to take care of their people, including this major refugee crisis that we've just been hearing about.

9:57So when I sat down with the Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Moutaki and the elegant foreign ministry compound, the first question I asked him was to basically set out how did he see his relations now with the international community. After this, we can divide the world into two parts. One is Asia and the other Europe or one is East and the other is West. Our relations have developed a lot with regional and eastern countries. In terms of economy, politics, relations, investment, we have good achievements. And with European countries as well, there are developments. In some countries, our representative offices have opened and our diplomats have arrived.

10:44You're still isolated from the West. Is it a priority to try to fix that? We shouldn't call all Europe the world. We have good relations with the world countries, and there are developments with the European countries. One of the biggest issues, blocking better relations with the West, is how the Taliban government treats the rights of women and girls. Doesn't it concentrate your mind on the urgency of improving that? The conduct with women shouldn't be looked at from the Western culture and traditions glasses. Here, the Afghan values should be looked at. But there are other developments in Afghanistan to look at.

11:30The cultivation of drugs in Afghanistan is zero. There is security in Afghanistan. Groups that could harm other countries, they are destroyed. There's a lot that we can have collaboration with the world. You know that even Islamic officials from Saudi Arabia, from Qatar, from Indonesia, from so many Islamic countries the world over gave you the same message. It's not an issue of a Western idea, educating women and girls and letting them work. Yes, these issues have been discussed by various countries and international organizations. and I express that we have a lot of female students in religious madrasas that they study until the end.

12:16In those madrasas, there are modern subjects too and there are more than 3 million female students under class 6 in schools who study. The UN says 2.4 million Afghan girls are now being deprived of a secondary education. If that continues, there won't be any Afghan women doctors, teachers and many more. Is that the kind of country you want to represent? This really is a problem, and it will be considered. So, Minister, five years on, what is your main message to the international community if there's to be any chance of achieving a different kind of relationship? Our message is that those countries who had good interaction with us, they benefited, both economic and political.

13:04And those who didn't have a relationship with us in the past five years, what have they benefited? Nothing. That was the Taliban Foreign Minister, Amir Khan Mottaki, asking a question. So many people are asking, Regina, what is the best way to talk to the Taliban? Is there any way to try to get some of their policies, whether it's on the restrictions on women and girls or counterterrorism? The Human Security Council still says that al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters have a presence in Afghanistan. Now, what about their inclusive governance? There are those who say, especially human rights groups and women activists in the diaspora, you should cut off all contact except humanitarian aid.

13:43Then others that I've spoken to who've worked there a long time, including Taliban who want to improve relations, say we need to have a more meaningful dialogue. We need to keep talking in a respectful way, a give and take. And that's the way to achieve change. But at the end of the day, the change has to come from within, from within the Taliban. And so far, even though it's quite striking how the minister admitted it is a real problem, in his words, if they don't educate girls and women. But for now, there's no sign that it's going to change. The BBC's chief international correspondent, Lise Doucette.

14:17There you can find more of her reporting from her time in Afghanistan on the BBC News website.

14:29This is Rajini Vaithanavan with NewsHour, coming to you live from the BBC in London. It is, by a stretch, the world's largest emitter of harmful greenhouse gases. But while it continues to build cold power plants, China is also rapidly developing its renewable energy sources. Last year, it installed more solar capacity than the rest of the world combined. And today, officials in Beijing say solar energy has overtaken coal as the country's largest source of power capacity for the first time ever. So is this a big shift in the way China generates its power? Qi Qin is a China analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

15:10I would say that it is an important milestone, but it still needs one major qualification. As you said, solar has overtaken coal in installed capacity, but not in the amount of electricity generated. According to the Chinese media, by the end of July, China had around 1 ,288 gigawatts of solar capacity, just slightly ahead of its coal power. But in the first half of this year, solar supplied only around 13 % of China's electricity, while coal has supplied 49.7%, almost four times as much. The Chinese media also highlighted that it's the first time that coal's share fell below half in terms of generation, but coal power generation still increased by 3.4 % in a year.

16:02So that is an important reminder side that the falling percentage share does not necessarily mean that coal use or emissions are falling in absolute terms. And that's what's interesting because it sounds like from what you're saying, the ability to generate power from solar might be increasing. But then to actually distribute that solar energy to actually be used in homes is where there's the challenge. Exactly. And so what needs to be done then? Well, I think the main reason behind that is that the coal power in China is still protected, both for being available as a supporting role and for generating electricity as a base load.

16:45So the coal power plants are being paid to stand by, and at the same time, they're being contracted to run. That makes it harder for the clean power to displace it. But of course, besides the pressure from coal power, there are some real technical constraints that can cause the curtailment of wind and solar. Like renewables are concentrated in north and west, while the demand is concentrated further east in China. So transmission, provincial trading, energy storage and flexible demand, they all have not kept up with the wind and solar build out. So first of all, coal power need to step back. The protection on coal power needs to be lessened.

17:27And second of all, like China is doing now, more broader power network, a grid needs to be, a more flexible grid needs to be strengthened. So there needs to be a more flexible grid. But even though China is increasing its renewables, it still has a big reliance on coal and is still building coal-powered stations. Yes, exactly. Like China's clean energy build-out is still enormous, but it has slowed sharply from the exceptional pace that we saw last year. Both newly added solar capacity and newly added energy storage saw a decrease in a year. And meanwhile, as you said, in the first half of 2026, the newly added coal power capacity increased by 43%.

18:07So part of the wind and solar build-out slowdown is a basic fact, But a bigger structural issue is whether the grid and power market can actually use all the electricity that they produce. Like we estimate that 360 terawatt hours of potential wind and solar generation was curtailed in the first half of the year. That is more electricity than the entire UK generated from all sources in the whole year of 2025. That's Chi Chin from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

18:46The male intersperses the booming with chinging. The chinging call is thought to help females attracted by the booming pinpoint the male's location. The male alternates between booming and chinging all night, every night, for three months. David Attenborough there describing the mating call, the chinging and the booming, as he describes it of the kakarpaw bird. With its beautiful green feathers, a large beak and owl-like eyes, the kakarpaw is undeniably cute. It's also flightless and the world's heaviest parrot, weighing up to four kilograms. Native to New Zealand, it was once widespread but has been driven close to extinction.

19:33Now hopes are rising as the successful breeding seasons increase the population from 235 to 325. It still sounds small, but it is a significant increase. Alison Balancehold hosts the Radio New Zealand podcast all about the kākāpō, the kākāpō files. This is really exciting and really significant news. We were down to 51 kākāpō in 1995. And here we are 30 years later, and we've just had a breeding season where nearly twice that many chicks were hatched and made it right through to the magic 150 days when they're independent and can be added to the population. And we're just at a point where the Kākāpō population has the capacity to start increasing significantly.

20:18What's changed to lead to this good news? Well, 1995 marked the beginning of the Kākāpō recovery programme that's run by the New Zealand Department of Conservation. One of the things you need to understand about Kākāpō is they do things very slowly. So they don't breed every year. They only breed every two to four years. Their breeding is triggered by the mass or massed fruiting of some of our native trees here, particularly pouta carps called remu. The fruit ripens in late summer, just in time for these kākāpō mums, who are solo mums, to raise their chicks. And it took 16 years from 1995 to make 90 kākāpō chicks.

20:57And now we're at a point where we've got lots of young birds, particularly young female birds in the population. And we can make 90 kākāpō chicks in a single breeding season, which is just incredible. In years past, these very cute birds were hunted for their meat and their beautiful feathers as well, weren't they? They were. So you have to remember that humans only arrived in New Zealand about 750 years ago. Polynesians first and later Europeans. Early Māori ate kākāpō. They used the feathers to make beautiful feather cloaks. Then there was a lot of forest clearance, so Kākāpō need native forest to live in.

21:33And the worst thing that happened was we introduced a lot of mammals to New Zealand. So New Zealand had no native mammals. And for Kākāpō in particular, stoats and rats have been a real problem. And so hand in hand with trying to rescue the birds, there's been a move in New Zealand to make offshore islands in particular predator-free to create some safe houses for this amazing species. Why do you love these birds so much? It's so unusual, a giant flightless night parrot found only in New Zealand. It looks endearing, of course. It's got such unusual biology. But I'm also really impressed by the team of very committed people who have turned the species around, and they've done it using all sorts of very innovative methods.

22:18And it's a conservation program that was very intensive to start with. So hand-rearing became very important. There's been a lot of effort to try and increase fertility through techniques such as artificial insemination. And more recently, they've been using very smart, innovative technology, which allow them these days to monitor kākāpō remotely from a distance. And so what's happened as numbers have slowly increased over the last 30 years, to the point where some of these more intensive management techniques, they can step back from that. We've heard about cases of bird flu in wild birds in New Zealand.

22:55Is there a concern and threat to Kākāpō with bird flu? There might be. On at least one of the islands, they coexist along with large populations of breeding seabirds which come into the same burrows that Kākāpō use. The New Zealand Department of Conservation has started a vaccination programme for five of our most threatened bird species, including Kākāpō. We are very concerned about what might happen this summer. That's Alison Balance, the host of the podcast, The Karkapur Files.

23:30Welcome back to NewsHour. The verdict reads as follows. We, the jury in the above-entitled case, find the defendant, Dwayne Keith-Davis, as follows. Count one, murder with use of a deadly weapon. Guilty of first-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon. Data this 31st date of August 2026. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is this your verdict as read? So say you want, so say you are. Yes. A jury in Las Vegas there delivering their verdict as they found a former gang leader, Dwayne Davis, guilty of the murder of the rapper Tupac Shakur. Davis was convicted of orchestrating the drive-by killing in 1996.

24:07Tupac Shakur was just 25 years old and at the height of his career. For decades, the case remained one of the world's most prominent unsolved murders. The BBC's Anushka Matanda-Doherty has been covering the trial in Las Vegas and she spoke to me from court. Yeah, so we had closing arguments and a verdict all in one day, which is pretty rare. To begin the day, we had the prosecution and the defence presenting to the jury their theories of what happened and then there was about a two-hour, two-and-a-bit-hour deliberation, which is very, very quick, before we all shuffled back in to hear the verdict at the end of the day.

24:43the reaction from the defendant it wasn't much he was pretty stony faced and the rest of his family didn't really react which was a complete opposite to what was going on on the other side of the room where we had massive emotional outpouring from Tupac Shakur's family his brother, his sister extremely emotional embracing the prosecutors and I think just bringing into clarity for anybody who wondered why are we doing this three decades later what it must have been like for them to live with those unanswered questions look no further. You talk about it being three decades. I mean, this was a case that many didn't expect to ever have a conclusion at times.