Fenced out of Pakistan by a roll of rusty barbed wire, hundreds of Afghan refugees crouched on the barren ground, unprotected against a scorching desert sun, staring bleakly ahead of them.
Some had been here at this desolate border crossing for up to five days, desperate to find shelter from what they believe are inevitable American airstrikes on their homeland, whose leaders have refused to bow to US demands to surrender Osama bin Laden.
On Saturday, a long line of about 1,000 refugees -- most of them women and children, the sick and old -- waited in a dusty no-man's land at the border crossing outside the Pakistani city of Chaman, at the foot of the forbidding 2,286m Kouzak Mountains.
With Pakistani frontier guards standing watchfully nearby, a few threw quick, furtive responses to journalists on the other side of the barbed-wire barrier: Yes, they were afraid to go back to their homes in Afghanistan. No, they did not know how long they could bear to wait here in these conditions, hoping to cross to safety.
Most of these refugees fled homes in and around the Afghan city of Kandahar, about 70km to the northwest. It is the home base of the Taliban, the purist Islamic movement that rules most of Afghanistan.
Sharing bin laden's fate
US President George W. Bush says the Taliban must hand over bin Laden -- the Saudi multimillionaire suspected of masterminding the catastrophic Sept. 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- or share in his fate. So Kandahar is considered a prime potential target, and many of its citizens are terrified.
Umar Gulahmed, a 23-year-old carpenter, fled Kandahar six days ago with his 20-year-old wife, Farzana, and his year-old son, Raza. They managed to make their way across the border and on to Quetta, the provincial capital of Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan Province, about 800km southwest of Islamabad.
In the week before Monday night, when the border closed, an estimated 15,000 people crossed over into Pakistan at the Chaman crossing, UN and Pakistani officials say. Uncounted others have slipped through since, along nearby unguarded desert frontier.
But several thousand of the new arrivals -- no reliable figures are available -- have been rounded up by Pakistani police and returned to Chaman to be sent home, including the Gulahmed family.
Fleeing to safety
Farzana Gulahmed, swathed in a long, enveloping black veil, knelt in the shade of a shed on the Pakistani side of the border, brushing away flies that clustered at sores on baby Raza's face, while her husband spoke of their expulsion.
"We are afraid of attacks, and I tried to get my family to safety," he said. "I'm angry, but I'm a poor man -- I can't fight these forces."
Pushing his way up, a Pakistani policeman gruffly instructed Gulahmed in the border area's Pashtun language: "Tell them you are going back to Afghanistan voluntarily."
With 2 million Afghan refugees already crowded within its borders -- the result of two decades of unrelenting warfare that left Afghanistan poor, in ruins, and under the Taliban's repressive rule -- Pakistan already feels overwhelmed. The country simply cannot cope, it says, with what could become a new tidal wave of Afghans fleeing feared or actual fighting.
"We already have so many refugees now," said Mohammed Shafi Kakar, the Pakistani district coordination officer at the Chaman crossing. If fighting comes, he said, "People may rush across the border in a mass, and that will be a big, big problem for us."
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