PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Afghan refugees began returning to their homeland from neighboring Pakistan on Wednesday after waiting more than four months for snow to clear from mountain roads, officials said.

The families were the first of about 600,000 refugees expected to return to Afghanistan this year, said the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Before the former Taliban regime was overthrown in a U.S.-led war in late 2001, an estimated 4 million Afghans were in exile, mostly in Pakistan and Iran.

More than 1.8 million Afghans had returned, mostly from Pakistan, before the overland repatriations were stopped last November after snow made the roads impassable.

A similar number of refugees remains in Pakistan, and last December the Pakistani and Afghan governments agreed on a plan to send the rest home within three years.

On Wednesday, more than 300 families loaded their belongings, including chickens, colorful quilts and window frames, and left the Kacha Garhi camp.

"I am happy to be going back with my sons," said Rabia Bibi, 45, whose husband was killed fighting the Russians in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

"We will rehabilitate our farms. Our relatives there will help us," her son, Gulab Khan, 25, said.

The two dozen trucks were to enter Afghanistan through Torkham, the main border crossing point, 30 miles west of Peshawar, said Waqar Maroof, a deputy chief of the Pakistani government department on Afghan refugees.

The Kacha Garhi camp was set up in a Peshawar suburb in 1980 following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and is still home to about 80,000 Afghans, Maroof said.