Days after the June ceasefire between Israel and Iran, the Islamic Republic’s state television aired footage of two Afghan men allegedly ‘confessing’ to acting as Israeli agents. Clearly coerced, the broadcast was a thin pretext for escalating Iran’s campaign of mass deportation against Afghan migrants, of whom it has reportedly forcibly returned more than 1.4 million since January.
Whilst many of the over 3 million documented and undocumented Afghans in Iran arrived following the Taliban’s 2021 return to power, many more have been there for decades, or their entire lives. Despite a common 921-kilometre border and certain cultural ties, Afghans remain marginalised in Iran, working in laborious conditions and granted limited rights to education, services and naturalization.
Feeding off growing anti-migrant sentiment and barely-credible propaganda about Zionist collaboration, Iran deported over 100,000 Afghans in just a few days during the June war. Even those with valid documents reported being detained without time to retrieve them, or having papers destroyed by Iranian authorities. With deportation camps outside the capital now filled beyond capacity, the Taliban administration and the United Nations have declared a ‘crisis’ over the scale of returns.
The drive echoes developments in Pakistan, where an extensive deportation campaign since late 2023 has seen more than 800,000 registered and unregistered Afghan refugees returned to a country many have never seen. Pakistan in July announced a halt on issuing visas for Afghans, compounding an ongoing climate of constant fear that Medicins Sans Frontiers says is having serious physical and mental health ramifications.
‘It’s the same in Iran and Pakistan now – people are so worried but there’s nothing they can do,’ says Nasim, a 20-year-old Afghan refugee from the Quetta, Pakistan, who escaped to Europe as an unaccompanied minor. ‘What will you do if they send you back to Afghanistan? There is no work, no stability, there’s no life there.’
