His long hair cascading down from his black turban, a bespectacled Hafiz Bismillah looks more like a scholar than a militant fighter. A madrassah teacher in his mid 30’s, he is also a trained guerrilla who recently returned from Afghanistan fighting along with the Taliban insurgents. “It is a part of our religious duty to participate in the jihad,” he said sitting cross-legged on a mud floor inside a compound in the sprawling Panjpiri Afghan refugee camp.

Some 60 miles northwest of Quetta, the camp sits on vast rocky field less than 25 miles from Kandahar’s Silrat district, a Taliban stronghold. Some 25,000 refugees still live in mud houses in the camp established about 30 years ago for Afghans fleeing the Soviet occupation. A barren mountain range separates the two countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There was massive support for the Taliban among the inhabitants, many of whom were born and grew up in the camp. “We are fighting to liberate our country from occupation and re-establish a true Islamic system,” said Pir. In his late twenties, his parents migrated from Kandahar in early 1980s.

The insurgents move freely on both sides of a sparsely guarded border. There has been a marked increase in the number of young men joining the Taliban with the escalation of war in Afghanistan. “We never had so many young people coming to join the war,” boasted Mr. Bismillah.

Panjpiri is only one of more than a dozen Afghan refugee camps in Balochistan spread along the border that have virtually become Taliban sanctuaries. These camps provide not only fresh fighters but also logistical support to the Taliban. Many camps have grown into small towns with around one million Afghan refugees in the province.

Surkhab camp, just 30 miles from Quetta with a population of around three hundred thousand, has become the fourth largest town in the province. “It is impossible to monitor each and every person coming to these camps, particularly when the border is porous,” said Major General Slaim Nawaz, the head of Frontier Corps, which is responsible for the border security.

Pashtunabad, a Quetta neighbourhood, looks more like Kandahar during the Taliban rule. Afghans have outnumbered the local Pashtuns. Men in the Taliban’s signature black turban can be seen roaming around congested bazaars and alleys. The majority of students at the main madrassah in the area, run by Maulana Noor Mohammed (a hard line cleric who is also a former member of parliament), are Afghans. Local government officials concede that the number of Afghans in and around Quetta have increased over the last few years.

It is a similar situation in the Khrotabad and Kuchlak districts in Quetta. According to government officials, Afghans now constitute almost 30% of Quetta city’s total population of 1.7 million. Many of them now have acquired a Pakistani national identity card and passport. Security officials said it was not an easy to track down any individual Taliban commander staying there. “But it is not possible for the entire top leadership of the Taliban to operate from there,” said General Nawaz.

The presence of Taliban is much more pronounced in Chaman, a dusty town that is also the main border post. Hundreds of madrassahs located in the area have become a major centre of recruitment for the Taliban.

According to a senior security official more than 3,000 students graduate from these seminaries each year, a majority of them Afghans who are potential Taliban recruits. The same seminaries from where the Taliban forces were initially raised in 1994 have once again become the main centre for producing a new generation of Islamic warriors.

Afghans now constitute more than 50% of Chaman’s population. But it is difficult to distinguish them from the local Pashtuns, who mostly belonged to Achkazai and Noruzai tribes living on both sides of the border. Many senior Taliban commanders have settled their families here, so have some senior officials in the Afghan government.

Mullah Brather, a deputy to Mullah Omar the supreme Taliban commander, is often seen in the area. Some of the senior ministers in the ousted Taliban regime are also living here under a different identity. Among them is Mullah Salim, who was the deputy minister for the department of the prevention of vice and promotion of virtue. Belonging to the Noruzai tribe, he did not find it difficult to melt away with the locals.

Many officers of the Afghan national army and border force have also settled their family in the area. General Abdul Raziq, the chief of the Afghan border force, has also settled his family in Chaman. According to one estimate, almost 50% of the Afghan border force has homes in the Pakistani area.

Pakistani officials said the Taliban never use Pakistani territory to attack NATO forces. “What ever they do is on the other side of the border,” said a senior home ministry official.

Pakistani analysts and political leaders warn that any use of force in the camps in congested areas could have disastrous consequence. “If we try, for example, to do a Sabra and Shatila-like operation in the Quetta camps, one can imagine the consequence of that,” warned Maleeha Lodhi, a former ambassador for Pakistan and now a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington.