JEDDAH, 3 November 2004 — Thousands of Afghans who live and work in Saudi Arabia and who have been issued new Afghan passports to replace the documents provided them earlier by Pakistan — which list them as Pakistanis — now find themselves facing a problem. The Kingdom’s passport office refuses to change the nationality in their iqamas (residence permits) to reflect their actual nationality.
When contacted by Arab News, the Afghan Embassy in Riyadh acknowledged the problem, saying the situation has arisen since the embassy began issuing new passports to Afghans in the Kingdom. Many of them had documents issued by Pakistan which list them as Pakistanis. This is the nationality in their iqamas but when they received their Afghan passport, they found it was impossible to change the nationality in their iqamas. Afghan officials have appealed to the Saudi authorities for help in solving the problem.
An official at the Afghan Embassy said, “Yes, there are problems. It happened after we began issuing new Afghan passports to our citizens in the Kingdom. We have taken the matter up with the authorities in the Kingdom and hope the Saudi government will intervene and agree to transfer the information contained in the new passports into the iqamas of these people.”
Afghans in Jeddah said they now face a difficult situation. They hold new passports issued by their embassy and they are unable to change the information in their iqamas to reflect their actual nationality.
The passport department says it is outside its jurisdiction to change nationalities in iqamas. The Director of the Passports Department in Makkah Region, Brig. Gen. Safar Al-Dosari, said the department was not concerned with the problem and had not received any instructions from higher authorities. The department, he explained, issues and renews iqamas based on information concerning the holder as shown in official documents.
Embassy records show there are 53,000 Afghans officially registered as working and living in Saudi Arabia. Unofficial estimates put the total number of Afghans in the Kingdom at around 500,000. Some 3.7 million Afghan refugees who fled the two-decade long conflict in Afghanistan are currently living in neighboring countries; the largest concentrations are in Pakistan — more than 2 million — and Iran — 1.5 million. More than 20 years after the Soviet Union invaded their country, Afghans are the largest, single refugee group in the world, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). More than 3.5 million Afghans have returned to their country since the end of 2001.
