Little Kabul

Nickname for an area of Paris home to a number of Afghan refugees.

“When the children’s playground in central Paris is closed off to the public at dusk, Bashar, Hassan, Amid and a dozen other Afghan boys creep in and set up their cardboard tents near the slide,” Agence France-Presse reported:

There they roll out their blankets and sleeping bags or huddle up to the nearby shrubs at the Villemin Square, in Paris’ trendy 10th district. As many as 100 Afghan refugee youths, some as young as 12, turn up every evening at the park to sleep, exhausted and broke as they struggle to rebuild their lives in the West. …

Rights groups are raising the alarm over the growing number of refugee children who wander the streets of Paris and make their way to this neighborhood, dubbed “Little Kabul.”

Reporting on a people-smuggling gang alleged to have helped more than a thousand illegal immigrants enter Britain, The Daily Mail noted:

Officers swooped on 11 suspected human traffickers in a run-down district of the French capital known as “Little Kabul,” close to the Gare du Nord station terminal with regular Eurostar trains to London.

Since the closure of the Sangatte hostel near Calais six years ago, the Gare du Nord district of Paris has become a new “hub” for refugees trying to reach Britain, police said. The area is said to be teeming with several thousand Kurdish, Afghan and Iraqi illegal immigrants, all hoping to sneak aboard lorries and trains heading for Britain.