A truck carrying Afghan families returning from Pakistan overturned on a major highway in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing at least 18 people — including 10 children and five women — and injuring dozens more. The accident occurred on the road linking the eastern city of Jalalabad, in Nangarhar province, with the capital Kabul, in Laghman province, a mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan. A provincial government spokesperson confirmed the toll of 18 dead and around 29 to 36 injured, with victims transported to hospitals in Nangarhar for emergency treatment. Authorities have opened an investigation, with officials saying the driver lost control of the vehicle.
The passengers were part of a broad and accelerating wave of Afghans returning from Pakistan. Since the start of 2026, some 447,400 Afghans have come back from Pakistan, according to figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Pakistani authorities have significantly tightened their stance on Afghan migrants and refugees in recent years, launching a crackdown on undocumented migrants in 2023 that has deported or pressured hundreds of thousands of families to leave — many of whom were born in Pakistan and had spent their entire lives there. With few options, families typically pack their belongings into commercial trucks for the journey home, creating dangerous overcrowding on already treacherous roads. Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesperson for the Taliban government, expressed condolences to the victims' families, noting that the tragedy coincided with the end of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.
Fatal road accidents are a chronic problem in Afghanistan, driven by poorly maintained infrastructure after decades of conflict, dangerous driving practices, and a near-total absence of traffic regulation. Saturday's crash echoes a similarly devastating incident last August, when a bus carrying Afghan migrants returning from Iran collided with two other vehicles in western Afghanistan, killing 78 people, including 19 children.
The scale of the ongoing return movement underscores why this matters beyond a single tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of people — many of them effectively stateless, having grown up outside Afghanistan — are being funnelled back into a country that lacks the infrastructure, services, and economic capacity to absorb them. The deadly conditions of the journey home are, for many, just the beginning of a wider humanitarian crisis.