This report has been published in partnership with the Guardian.
Sahar still doesn’t know how she got from a quiet night in her modest home in Shiraz to a blistering roadside in western Afghanistan, with five children, one handbag and no idea where to go.
“I didn’t even get to pack their clothes,” says Sahar, 40, sitting on a concrete step outside the refugee reception centre in Nimruz. “I begged them to give me two days to collect my things. But they didn’t listen. They threw us out like garbage.” Six days after they were sent to a refugee camp near Shiraz, they were deported.
Sahar, a widow from Baghlan, had lived in Iran for more than a decade. She ran a small tailoring workshop, had put a deposit down on a home, and was raising five children alone. Now, she’s homeless in her home country.
Her experience is part of a growing pattern. As Iran dramatically steps up deportations of Afghan refugees, they are increasingly targeting families, including single women — widows, single mothers, and women without male relations. For many who are returning to Afghanistan without a male guardian, they find themselves placed in direct conflict with Taliban law, which prohibits women from travelling alone or doing much else in public without a mahram.
Until recently, women were rarely forcibly returned from Iran, which focused its efforts on arresting and deporting men, often undocumented labourers. But this year Afghan border officials report seeing a shift in the demographics of those Afghans whom Iran was sending back. From March to May 2025, at least 100 unaccompanied women were deported through a single border point in Nimruz province. In the past 18 months, more than 820 unaccompanied women have passed through that crossing.
The numbers accelerated ahead of yesterday’s deadline set by the Iranian regime for all undocumented Afghans to leave the country. Overall, the number of Afghans deported in May was more than three times the number returned in May 2024, according to the International Organization for Migration.
The United Nations reports that 43,000 people were returned to Afghanistan on July 1. Every border crossing is being overwhelmed by desperate Afghans, even as the summer temperatures soar. On July 2 alone, 1,130 families endured heat of 50 degrees as they crossed the border in Nimruz, according to Haji Reyaz, a local official at the border. “Some of our fellow citizens have died of heat and thrust because no water is given to them in the refugee camps in Iran and we are seeing an increase in deportation of women,” he tells Zan Times in a WhatsApp voice message.
A similar scene is playing out in Herat, where a Zan Times journalist witnessed two people fainting at the Islam Qala border crossing on Thursday, July 3. Border officials in Herat also confirm that at least 13 bodies have arrived in the past two weeks. It was not clear whether they had died of heat and thirst or were killed during the Israel airstrikes.
The officials tell Zan Times that more than 30,000 people a day have been crossing the border into Afghanistan from Islam Qala since the war began between Iran and Israel. That pace has accelerated since they stopped fighting.
On Thursday, Fariba, 22, arrived in Islam Qala from Tehran with her ill mother. They’d been given less than 24 hours to leave the country. Her two brothers stayed behind because their employers refused to pay their salaries and the landlord won’t return their rent down payment. Altogether, they are owed 80 million tomans. “We don’t know where to go and what to do, we don’t have anything,”says Fariba.
Zan Times saw that those arriving at border crossings in Nimruz and Herat are thirsty, hungry, exhausted, and often ill. Many have walked for hours in the blazing sun, often without water. Most have no belongings: no money, no documentation, and no clear plan of what to do next.
“From Shiraz to Zahedan, they took everything from us,” Sahar says. “My bank card had 15 million tomans. They charged 50,000 tomans for a bottle of water, 100,000 for a cold sandwich. And if you didn’t have it, your child went without.”
She spent six days in detention, sleeping next to the toilets, feeding her five children what scraps she could find. “It was like prison. There was no milk for my baby. I got sick and my children got sick. I kept telling myself to stay strong for them. But every hour felt like a punishment.”
Back in Afghanistan, Sahar knows that her options are bleak. Women without a male guardian cannot even move between provinces much less support a family. She has an elderly mother in Baghlan, but no home, no job, and no husband. “I asked for land [from the Taliban], anything to start again,” she explains.“They said, ‘You’re a woman, you have no mahram. You don’t qualify.’”
Like Sahar, many of those women forcibly returned from Iran find themselves stranded at the border, unable to continue their journey. Maryam, a 50-year-old originally from Kunduz, was alone when she was deported from Iran last month. She had fled Afghanistan four years ago after her eldest son was killed in a bombing. She found shelter in Iran with her two younger sons, who work in a mine to support the family. In April, she was arrested while at home. “They came for me, said I had no right to stay,” she says. “I asked to call my boys. They refused.” She still doesn’t know where her sons are. “I’m here, sick, alone. I can’t sleep. I don’t know if they are safe, if they’ve been sent back too.”
In the refugee reception camps along the borders in Herat and Nimruz, conditions are basic at best. Aid workers provide only limited medical support and short-term accommodation. Services are stretched thin, and women arriving without any male relatives discover that the safety net is virtually non-existent.
Farideh, a mother of two young children, was deported from Yazd after her husband had been sent back several weeks earlier. “They came while I was returning from the tailor’s. I didn’t have time to take anything,” she says, holding her nine-month-old daughter in her arms. “In the camp, my baby cried for hours. There was no milk. They told me, ‘Why are you here alone?’”
Others speak of mistreatment en route to the border. Deportees talk of verbal abuse, no air conditioning in extreme heat, and bribes being demanded for basic services.
No one is safe from such deportations. Zahra and her daughter got deported when they went to plead with the Iranian police to release her teenage son who was arrested from a bakery in Bandar Abas. Zahra spent a full day and night in the Zahedan camp with no food, no water, no shelter, buying just one biscuit and a bottle of water for her daughter.
Iranian police took everyone’s mobile phones when they were loaded onto deportation buses. They demanded 200,000 tomans under the pretext of “keeping it safe.” Zahra says they didn’t turn on the air conditioning in the stifling heat: “They said it’s a waste for you Afghans. My child cried from the heat, but the driver laughed and mocked us.”
“Women are coming back broken, exhausted, and many traumatized,” says one humanitarian staff member at the border in Nimruz. “And there is no system to support them once they leave this camp.”
The Taliban regime says it offers short-term shelter and transport assistance to women deported without a mahram. But multiple returnees say they received no such help.
One woman who recently arrived with her newborn says that she was denied food and shelter because she didn’t meet the official criteria for assistance: “They told me, ‘You’re not eligible. You don’t have a man with you.’ But my baby is just four days old. Where am I supposed to go?”
Human rights groups say the forced return of single women, particularly to a country run by a regime that restricts their movement and livelihood, is a violation of international humanitarian standards. They are calling on the Iranian government to halt the deportations, and on the international community to step in.
Meanwhile, in the border towns of western Afghanistan, the cycle continues: buses arrive daily, carrying men, and now often women and whole families. Some are elderly, some have infants, and many are simply alone.
Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and writer. Hamasa Haqiqatyar and Rad Radan are pen names of Zan Times journalists in Afghanistan. Kreshma Fakhri contributed to this report.
