By Lala Shams*
At 27 years old, Sama is at the peak of her young life. She’s also increasingly despondent. Sama* illegally entered Pakistan via the Spin Boldak border crossing in October 2022. Before the Taliban takeover, she worked in Afghanistan for a foreign NGO advocating for women’s rights. After the republic’s fall, she faced numerous threats and felt compelled to leave Afghanistan. She undertook the dangerous trek alone.
Now, Sama and her two roommates live in a one-room apartment. The three women sleep on a thin carpet without any beds or mattresses. Sama seldom leaves their apartment. While her two roommates possess Pakistani visas, Sama doesn’t have one.
After a year inside her small home, separated from her family, Sama is miserable. She suffers from extreme fear and anxiety, in part because of hearing of other refugees being detained by Pakistani authorities. She knows that if they discover she doesn’t have a visa then they will heavily fine her and possibly detain her before deporting her back to Afghanistan.
She finds that medication is the only way she can cope with her mental health issues, which result in her struggling to sleep. “Several times I decided to jump off from the building, but something stopped me. Sometimes, I think it is better to take my medicine all at once and die. I am exhausted,” she tells Zan Times.
Sama isn’t alone among Afghan refugees in having suicidal ideations. The situation facing refugees in Pakistan is so chaotic that at least three young people have died by suicide in the last two years, according to media reports. It is likely a gross undercount. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that about 3.6 million people left Afghanistan in 2021 and 2022, with around 70 percent of asylum seekers taking refuge in Iran, with another 18 percent in Pakistan and 11 percent in Turkey.
At around 2 a.m. on August 30, 2023, a 24-year-old refugee named Maryam Sadat threw herself from the fifth floor of the residential blocks of the B-17 area of Islamabad. Pikai Azizi, Maryam’s mother, tells Zan Times that her daughter suffered severe depression in the last three months. They tried everything they could to make her feel better but to no avail. In the middle of the night, Maryam Sadat jumped, leaving her mother heartbroken: “I ran five floors down. My daughter was soaked in blood and soil. I hugged her; her hand was broken, and blood came from her ears and nose. I said, ‘My daughter, why did you do this? Why did you throw yourself off the building?’ She was only looking at me; she was alive for a minute. A minute later, she died in my arms.”
Pakistani police kept Maryam’s body in a forensic center for 13 hours. When police finally returned her body to her family, Pikai Azizi says that police did not allow them to open the coffin. “They told us that she should be buried right away. What was the reason for this? Why didn’t the United Nations send a representative to know about our situation?’ complains Pikai Azizi.
Maryam Sadat’s family says that they were transferred from Afghanistan to Islamabad a year ago to continue their refugee resettlement process. They say their case is part of the so-called “Priority 2” program of the United States, which was launched to resettle vulnerable families. However, the uncertain process of the asylum case and the problems inherent in being refugees caused Maryam to fall into severe depression and finally to die by suicide. “I contacted the United Nations many times in writing and in person and complained about our problems,” says Pikai. “I said my daughter’s condition is bad and to help us, but they thought we were lying.”
Her sister Anahita* says that Maryam did not talk to anyone in the days leading to her death, even though she’d gotten engaged to a distant relation a month earlier. “She was sitting in a corner alone. As I was in the same room with her day and night, I did not understand that she intended to take her life,” Anahita says.
Within weeks of each other this summer, two young refugees in Pakistan died by suicide after being forced to leave Afghanistan after the Taliban came to power.
In late July, a 21-year-old young man named Saeem threw himself from the blocks of Gulberg Green in Islamabad. He had been an engineering student at Kabul Polytechnic University before he and his family fled to Pakistan through the Torkham border a year ago due to security threats. There they waited for any progress on processing their asylum application so it could be transferred to another country.
Saeem had depression and though his family sought treatment for him from several doctors, he died by suicide, explains his brother Ahmad*. They had tried everything, including keeping a close eye on him. “He was in his room, but I could see Saeem from the hallway,” Ahmad tells Zan Times. “I was only busy for a minute, and he was not there. I searched the room and did not find him. I hurriedly ran towards the balcony and saw that he had thrown himself already.”
A few weeks later, a 24-year-old named Zakaria Baloch died by hanging in his home on August 19. He had lived as a refugee in Pakistan for more than 18 months and had financial problems.
Many refugees recount harassment at the hands of Pakistani authorities. In September, Zan Times showed how some refugees and migrants from Pakistan have been repeatedly arrested, beaten, and fined by Pakistan security forces, with some threatened with deportation if they didn’t pay for their release from detention.
On September 22, Pakistani media reported that the High Court of Islamabad ordered that refugees who have valid United Nations documents should not be arrested or imprisoned. Yet sometimes, the treatment meted out by UN officials themselves is as harsh as that from Pakistani officials. Hadia*, a refugee living in one of the refugee-settled neighbourhoods of Islamabad, Pakistan, recounts to Zan Times the improper behaviour of a worker for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Pakistan: “I was very tired once, and I told the UN representative over the phone, if you don’t give me an appointment and don’t listen to my problems, I will kill myself. The employee told me, ‘If you want to hang yourself tomorrow, do it today. Hang your husband with yourself, too.’”
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and writer. Lala Shams is the pseudonym of a Zan Times journalist.
