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PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Pakistan on Saturday partially reopened the Torkham border crossing with Afghanistan to allow thousands of stranded Afghan refugees to return home, officials said.
Restrictions remain on all other cross-border movement, including trade.
Pakistan closed all border crossings with Afghanistan on Oct. 12 following deadly clashes in which both sides claimed to have killed dozens of troops.
The closure, which lasted nearly three weeks, left thousands of Afghan refugees stranded along with hundreds of trucks carrying goods, suspending key trade routes between the two countries.
The reopening came after Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to maintain a ceasefire following nearly weeklong negotiations facilitated by Turkiye and Qatar aimed at preventing a wider conflict in the region.
Authorities said no new exchange of fire has been reported since the ceasefire along the 2,611-kilometer (1,622-mile) border, known as the Durand Line, which Afghanistan has never formally recognized.
Thousands of Afghan refugees had been moved to a temporary camp near the border, while hundreds more waited along the roadside for the crossing to reopen. Despite the partial reopening, trade across the frontier remains suspended on both sides.
Local officials at the Afghan side told The Associated Press that the gate was reopened Saturday morning exclusively for Afghan refugees, with thousands expected to cross back into Afghanistan throughout the day.
They urged all other travelers to refrain from using the crossing until further notice.
A video released by the Information and Culture Department of Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province showed local officials and Afghan soldiers standing at the Torkham gate holding flowers to welcome returning refugees as they crossed back into their country.
The development came a day after Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan, Ahmad Shakeeb, wrote on X that large numbers of Afghan refugees remained stranded because of Pakistan’s closure of border crossings.
On Friday, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Tahir Andrabi said the Afghan ambassador had violated diplomatic norms by airing his grievances on social media instead of communicating through Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry.
Since 2023, Pakistan has launched a campaign to deport immigrants living illegally in the country. More than a million Afghans have been repatriated as part of the effort.
Earlier this month, Pakistan’s military said it carried out airstrikes on the hideouts of the Pakistani Taliban inside Afghanistan, killing dozens of people it described as insurgents. Afghan officials denied the claim, saying civilians were among the dead, and said Afghan forces had struck Pakistani military posts in retaliation, killing 58 soldiers. Pakistan’s military acknowledged losing 23 troops in the fighting.
The violence prompted Qatar to invite delegations from both sides to Doha, where they agreed to a ceasefire on Oct. 19. It was followed by six days of talks in Istanbul that continued until Thursday night, when the two sides agreed to maintain the truce.
Pakistan has seen a sharp rise in militant attacks in recent months, most claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. The group, designated a terrorist organization by both the United States and the United Nations, is separate from the Afghan Taliban but has been emboldened by the Afghan group’s takeover of Kabul in 2021.

DODOMA, Tanzania: Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan won the country’s disputed election with more than 97 percent of the vote, according to official results announced early Saturday, in a rare landslide victory in the region.
The result is likely to amplify the concerns of critics, opposition groups and others who said the election in Tanzania was not a contest but a coronation after Hassan’s two main rivals were barred or prevented from running. She faced 16 candidates from smaller parties.
The Oct. 29 election was marred by violence as demonstrators took to the streets of major cities to protest the vote and stop the counting of votes. The military has been deployed to help police quell riots. Internet connectivity has been on and off in the East African nation, disrupting travel and other activities.
The protests have spread across Tanzania, and the government has postponed the reopening of universities, which had been set for Nov. 3.
There was a tense calm in the streets of Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital, on Saturday. Security forces manning roadblocks asked to see the identity cards of those who went out.
Tanzanian authorities have not said how many people have been killed or injured in the violence. A spokesman for the UN human rights office, Seif Magango, on Friday told a UN briefing in Geneva by video from Kenya that credible reports of 10 deaths were reported in Dar es Salaam, alongside Shinyanga and Morogoro towns.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Friday he was concerned by the situation in Tanzania and urged all parties to “prevent further escalation.”
The foreign ministers of the UK, Canada and Norway in a joint statement cited “credible reports of a large number of fatalities and significant injuries, as a result of the security response to protests.”
Tundu Lissu, leader of the Chadema opposition group, has been jailed for months, charged with treason after he called for electoral reforms that he said were a prerequisite for free and fair elections. Another opposition figure, Luhaga Mpina of the ACT-Wazalendo group, was barred from running.
At stake for the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi, or CCM, party was its decades-long grip on power amid the rise of charismatic opposition figures who hoped to lead the country toward political change.
Still, a landslide victory is unheard of in the region. Only President Paul Kagame, the authoritarian leader of Rwanda, regularly wins by a landslide.
Rights groups including Amnesty International cited a pattern of enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings in Tanzania ahead of the polls.
In June, a United Nations panel of human rights experts cited more than 200 cases of enforced disappearance since 2019, saying they were “alarmed by reports of a pattern of repression” ahead of elections.
Hassan oversaw “an unprecedented crackdown on political opponents,” the International Crisis Group said in its most recent analysis. “The government has curbed freedom of expression, ranging from a ban on X and restrictions on the Tanzanian digital platform JamiiForums to silencing critical voices through intimidation or arrest.”
The political maneuvering by Tanzanian authorities is remarkable even in a country where single-party rule has been the norm since the advent of multi-party politics in 1992.
Government critics point out that previous leaders tolerated opposition while maintaining a firm grip on power, whereas Hassan is accused of leading with an authoritarian style that defies youth-led democracy movements elsewhere in the region.
But Tanzania is different, an outlier in the region.
A version of the governing CCM party, which maintains ties with the Communist Party of China, has ruled Tanzania since its independence from Britain in 1961, a streak that Hassan extends with her victory.
CCM is fused with the state, effectively in charge of the security apparatus and structured in such a way that new leaders emerge every five or 10 years. Hassan herself was able to rise to the presidency as vice president without incident when her predecessor, John Pombe Magufuli, died suddenly not long after the start of his second term.
The orderly transition sustained Tanzania’s reputation as an oasis of political stability and relative peace, a major reason for CCM’s considerable support across the country, especially among rural voters.