After the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan in 2021, Nawida fled with her family to neighboring Iran. The lawyer had helped send members of the Islamist group to jail, and feared being arrested — or killed — for her work.
More than three years later, she is again in hiding — this time in a Tehran suburb with her siblings and eight-year-old son. Iran has embarked on a massive deportation drive of the country’s 3 million-plus population of Afghan refugees, some of whom authorities say aided Israel’s airstrikes on the country last month.
“I don’t know for how long we can keep ourselves like prisoners and I don’t know what lies ahead for us,” said Nawida, who no longer has a valid visa and didn’t want to give her full name to avoid being identified. “We’re calling out loud on the international community to reach out and help us.”
Iran is rounding up Afghan nationals like Nawida due to accusations that non-documented migrants from the country spied for Israel and helped it launch missiles during a 12-day bombing campaign in June. The claims have been made by the state broadcaster, while Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, reported that several Afghans had been arrested on espionage charges and for possessing manuals for making drones and bombs.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, which oversees spy agency Mossad, had no immediate comment.
More than 1 million people have returned to Afghanistan since June 1, of which 627,000 were deported by the authorities, the United Nations said on Friday.
“Our teams are at the borders, receiving and assisting streams of exhausted, hungry, and scared people,” Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said by email. “Staff and structures are absolutely inundated.”
While it’s difficult to verify the Iranian allegations, they have triggered a surge in xenophobic violence and harassment against an already marginalized Afghan community, which has grown in Iran since the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent wars including the 2001 US invasion. About 2.6 million officially registered Afghans live in Iran, according to the UN, and a further 500,000 are undocumented and considered illegal by the Iranian state.
Iranian officials estimate the total number living in the country is closer to six million, or about 7% of the population, and often refer to them as “guests” who have access to housing and basic services at a time when Iran’s economy has been strained by sanctions.
The UN has warned the deportation effort will have “devastating consequences” for both Afghanistan and the communities and families being uprooted. That includes the loss of millions of dollars-worth of remittances sent home by Afghans working in Iran each year.
The Taliban’s Prime Minister, Mullah Muhammad Hassan, called on Iranian authorities to “approach the deportation process with patience and gradualism.” according to a statement from his office.
That contrasts with accounts from several deportees interviewed by Bloomberg, who said Iranian authorities have been rounding up Afghans in the street before taking them to remote detention centers. They are then taken by bus to Iran’s border crossing at Islam Qala, where they cross into Herat province, in western Afghanistan.
“Many of them have been away for years, they don’t have a house of home,” the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, said in a statement during a visit to Islam Qala. “Many people live at or below the poverty line so the influx is going to be an extraordinary burden on the country.”
Deportees face building a new life in an impoverished, heavily sanctioned Afghanistan struggling with multiple crises including acute food insecurity, water shortages, and basic infrastructure crippled by successive wars.
Many, like Nawida, will be at risk of being targeted by the Taliban if they worked for the previous Afghan administration or for US and European institutions. Girls and women will be excluded from education beyond sixth grade and are largely shut out of employment opportunities.
It feels like “coming to the world’s biggest cage, although it’s my homeland,” Ahmad Saber, one of the deportees in Herat, said by phone. “What will happen to my three daughters’ education and their future?”
London-based Amnesty International last week urged Iran to immediately stop “violently uprooting” Afghans as it violates an international principle prohibiting the return of anyone to a country where they risk having their human rights violated. Expelling women and girls to Afghanistan puts them in particular danger, Amnesty said, due to the Taliban’s policy of gender persecution.
Research published by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on Thursday found that Afghans who were forcibly transfered back to the Taliban-controlled state last year experienced serious human rights violations including torture, ill treatment, arbitrary arrest and threats to personal security.
The majority of Afghans who flee to Iran are from the minority Hazara community, who, like most Iranians, are Shia muslim and have faced violent persecution under the Taliban. With strong linguistic and religious ties, Iran has been seen as a natural port of refuge, and shares a relatively porous border with Afghanistan that’s almost 1,000 km long.
But Iranian authorities keep strict limits on the ability of Afghans to integrate, even after decades of living in the country and raising families there. Afghans are generally prohibited from gaining citizenship unless one parent is an Iranian national. Universities and many job sectors are hard to access for Afghans, many of whom end up employed as casual laborers and construction workers.
While the Iranian government says its only deporting Afghans classified as illegal, the Afghan Analysts Network, an independent research organization, has heard numerous reports of individuals with passports and other legal identity papers being targeted, creating a climate of panic and fear.
“We’re hearing stories of people who were in Iran legally and had their paperwork and passports destroyed and defaced when they were stopped in the street by the police,” said Roxanna Shapour of the AAN. They are then told “now you are illegal,” she said.
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