Jalozai (Pashto: جلوزی), also Jallozai, Jailozai, and Jelazee, is a village located in Nowshera District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Pakistan.

The camps briefly received an additional influx of refugees in the period after 9/11, leading up to the United States invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

[3] American intelligence analysts alleged, during the Administrative Review Board hearing of Guantanamo detainee Adel Hassan Hamad, that the camp was directed by Zahid Al-Sheikh, an older brother of senior al Qaeda planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

I haven’t seen him since, and at the time I didn’t know who he was.”After 1979, Peshawar served as a political centre for anti-Soviet Mujahideen, and became surrounded by huge camps of Afghan refugees.

That major border city of a million people then replaced Kabul and Kandahar as the centre of ethnic Pashtuns (Pakhtuns) cultural development during the 1980s.

Bin Laden had been based around Peshawar since 1981, where he and Dr. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam were running a large contingent of foreign Arabs and material support involved in the Afghan resistance.

[citation needed] In October 2000, the USS Cole bombing by al-Qaeda brought many relief agencies to Pakistan, in anticipation of a new exodus of Afghan refugees.

Though it was limited to cruise missiles fired into al-Qaeda training camps in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the expected wave of new refugees also followed.

[8] By late 2001, the combined Jalozai refugee camps were estimated by Reuters to have been home to 300,000 Afghans in total during various times over more than two decades.

No registration had ever taken place in the camp, so substandard living conditions prevailed for the tens of thousands of refugees at Jalozai.

[9] As of February 11, 2002, the roughly 800 refugees remaining in Jalozai were scheduled to be transferred to Barkili close to the Afghan border on the following day.

[citation needed] On March 9, 2003, Pakistani security forces carried out raids in Jalozai refugee camp near Peshawar.

[citation needed] As of 2005, camp closures continued in parallel with the UNHCR repatriation operation that began in March 2002 and helped 2.4 million Afghan refugees from Pakistan to go home, the agency's largest such programme anywhere in the world.

In 2012 Pakistan continued its effort to close the remaining refugee camps in the country and banned extensions of all foreign visas, including Afghanistan, leading to a mass number of returnees.

[11][12] In July 2020, KP Chief Minister Mehmood Khan officially launched the Jalozai Special Economic Zone in the Nowshera District.