A day after Pakistan’s deadline for deporting undocumented immigrants expired, Yasmin* heard a loud knock on the door of her home. The family lawyer from Afghanistan was preparing breakfast for her four children, husband and two female guests in Islamabad. After she opened the door, eight Pakistani police officers stormed inside, searched every corner of her home and arrested everyone inside, including her one-year-old son.
“They asked for our documents and we showed the documents we got from UNHCR. They threw them away and said, ‘Your visa has expired and all of you are under arrest,’” Yasmin tells Zan Times in a phone interview.
“I begged them to allow me to dress my children, but they didn’t allow me,” she says. The police took everyone to prison.
A few hours after Yasmin and her family were put into the prison, her one-year-old son had a seizure. Yasmin was only allowed to take him to a hospital after she desperately shouted for help.
“We were 40 people, including women and children, in one prison room with only two beds. The elderly women were sitting on the beds and the rest of us were sitting on the cold and damp floor,” explains Yasra*, Yasmin’s 15-year-old daughter. “Nobody had warm clothes and we were shaking from the cold. Children were crying from the cold and hunger. My stomach was hurting, like everyone else because we were hungry. They kept us hungry for the entire time in the prison,” she adds. Members of Yasmin’s family claim they were detained for 24 hours without water and food and then sent to a deportation camp.
Their experience is part of a disturbingly large trend. In a statement published on November 28, Human Rights Watch warned that Pakistan officials have “committed widespread abuses” against Afghan refugees in Pakistan in order to force them to return to Afghanistan. The abuses include mass detentions, seizing property and livestock, and destroying identity documents of Afghans living in Pakistan, according to HRW. “Pakistani officials have created a coercive environment for Afghans to force them to return to life-threatening conditions in Afghanistan,” stated Elaine Pearson, Asia director at HRW.
The crisis started in early October when Pakistan announced plans to deport undocumented immigrants who don’t voluntarily leave the country by November 1. The deportation threat affects an estimated 1.3 million undocumented Afghans currently residing in Pakistan. Some were already returning: since mid-September 2023, 375,000 Afghans have made the trip back to Afghanistan, including 20,000 who have been deported, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). According to UNHCR and IOM, 92 percent of the returnees cited “fear of arrest” in Pakistan as a reason for their return.
There are reports that five female lawyers have been arrested and incarcerated in Pakistan while 20 Afghan female judges who are also in Pakistan are facing the imminent risk of deportation to Afghanistan, according to a joint statement by the International Bar Association (IBA) and the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI).
Yasmin and her family never thought they’d have to flee to Pakistan. Before August 2021, she had her own small law firm in Herat province, where she and her five female lawyers helped women divorce their abusive husbands. When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, the women lawyers were forced out of their profession, while their lives were put at risk by both the Taliban and the abusive husbands of their former clients.
That was when she decided to leave Afghanistan. In May 2022, Yasmin finally arrived in Pakistan with a medical visa. A few months later, Pakistan rejected her request to extend her visa, and soon after, her visa expired. Still, she says she can’t go back to Afghanistan.
“Everyone loves their country, but when your country becomes your prison, you flee from it. Right now, Afghanistan is like a prison for women and their living is becoming impossible with every passing day,” explains 27 year-old Fatima* to Zan Times. She’s in a camp near the Torkham border, where more than 1000 tents are set up to provide temporary shelters for the returnees.
Fatima left Afghanistan when her father, an officer at the National Directorate of Security, was killed in a suicide bomb attack in July 2018. “Our lives changed when my father died. We never felt safe and decided to go to Pakistan,” she says. For the last five years, they lived in the Hayatabad neighbourhood of Peshawar, where Fatima was able to support her family of five by working in a beauty salon.
“The Pakistani police arrested my aunt and her three sons. They were badly beaten and forcefully deported. Hearing their story, we got scared and decided to return,” Fatima adds. Spending a week in a camp tent was hard, Fatima recounts. Her family only received a 10,000 afghani in cash donation from the UNHCR and meals from a variety of other organizations, including the Taliban.
Fatima says her situation is particularly hard because she is the breadwinner of her family and the Taliban outlawed her female profession this past summer. Now, as Fatima worries for the future, she is keen to find a way to go back to Pakistan, where she says she could still find work.
The fate of women such as Fatima is a particular concern for United Nations Human Rights Chief Volker Türk: “Women and girls arriving in Afghanistan are particularly vulnerable. The de facto authorities’ policies and edicts mean that they will be prevented from continuing their education beyond grade six, from working in most sectors, from accessing parks and other public spaces, and will face other broad restrictions on their participation in daily and public life.”
Volker Türk has urged Pakistan to “ensure protection for individuals who may face persecution, torture, ill-treatment or other irreparable harm in Afghanistan, [including] Afghan women and girls, former government officials and security personnel, ethnic and religious minorities, human rights defenders and civil society activists and media workers.”
Zara* hasn’t left her room in Pakistan for three weeks for fear of deportation. As a survivor of domestic abuse who fled Afghanistan in late 2021, she hasn’t slept well since Pakistan announced its deportation deadline. “Yesterday, the landlord told me that I have to find a new place. No one is giving a room to a young, lonely woman. Every night, I have nightmares of being arrested and deported to Afghanistan. If I am deported, the Taliban might kill or force me into marriage with one of their fighters,” 28-year-old Zara explains in a phone interview.
She was orphaned at a young age and left in the custody of her uncle, who decided to marry her to an old man. She was 13 years old. Her uncle beat and tortured her when she opposed the marriage. Finally, Zara fled her uncle’s home with thoughts of dying by suicide. When she tried to throw herself in front of a car, a stranger came to her rescue and helped her find safety. During the next 12 years, she found safety and livelihood in a shelter supported by the now-defunct Ministry of Women’s Affair.
The Taliban eradicated the entire system of safe houses. Soon after, Taliban fighters arrived at the door of Zara’s shelter in Kabul, where 16 women were living. Zara and three other young girls manage to flee to Pakistan. Today, she is registered with the UNHCR and awaits resettlement in a third country, though her tourist visa has expired.
The fear and stress expressed by Zara is shared by Mariam*, a former employee of the Interior Ministry in Afghanistan. “It is very difficult to live as a young woman in Pakistan. I don’t have a job and depend on the stipend my father sends from Afghanistan. I am living every minute in fear and stress of deportation. If I am sent back to Afghanistan, I might be forced to marry a Taliban or an old man who might be several times my age,” the 26-year-old tells Zan Times.
Mariam was working at the police headquarters in Kunduz province when the Taliban took over. She and her family of seven fled to Iran, with the hope of reaching Turkey. But the closed Iran-Turkey border combined with difficulty finding work in Iran forced the family to return to Afghanistan.
“Once I arrived in Kunduz, I received a phone call from Kunduz Police headquarter. They wanted me back at work. And I was very excited to go back to work,” Mariam says. That hope was short-lived. “After I finished all the paperwork, they told me I cannot work there because I am a woman. That scared me a lot. I thought, if they didn’t want me to work, why did they call me in the first place? It could have been a trap,” she worries, adding that soon after, she got a visa and fled to Pakistan.
Although Yasmin, the former family lawyer, was able to get help from an international association of lawyers to secure the release of her family before they were deported to Afghanistan, her family still lives in fear. Her teenage daughter, Yasra, says she has nightmares of being arrested again.
On the other side of the border in Afghanistan, Fatima isn’t sure what to do next as her decision will determine the future of her family: “I see a dark future for the people of Afghanistan, both men and women. No matter if you are a shopkeeper or a vendor, there is no peace and comfort for you. They are alive, but they are not living. ”
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and journalist.
