I was five years old when I arrived in Iran as a refugee fleeing a war I didn’t understand. It was 1985. My family, like millions of others, had escaped the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. We crossed borders not in search of a better life, but just to stay alive.
We weren’t treated as equals, but we were treated with humanity. We didn’t have the same rights, but we had dignity. That mattered. When you’re running from bombs, survival comes before belonging.
I remember the scent of sangak bread before sunrise, and the sound of the baker’s shovel scraping against the walls of the oven. I remember copying verses of Hafez and Saadi into my notebooks, even when I didn’t fully understand their meaning. I remember neighbors who had every reason to see us as outsiders, but who welcomed us anyway.
Between the ages of five and 13, Iran was my home. It gave me what war had stolen: continuity, rhythm, and shelter. I never forgot.
Now, I am being forced to.
What is happening to Afghan refugees in Iran today is the collapse of human rights.
Children are being dragged from homes and dumped at borders they have never crossed. People are being herded into detention centres without due process, without charges, and without cause. According to IOM the total number of people deported in 2025 has crossed one million.
Many of them were born and raised in Iran. They have never even set foot in Afghanistan. They are not returning to a homeland. They are being exiled into unfamiliar terrain, often without food, money, or identification.
Some are beaten. Some vanish. Some do not make it back at all.
The message is clear: You were never meant to stay. And if we let you stay, it was a favour. Now that favour is over.
This violence didn’t erupt overnight. It was baked into the system from the start.
Today, more than five million Afghans live in Iran, many of them undocumented, stateless, and invisible. Most have been there since the 1980s. They harvested Iranian crops, built Iranian roads, hauled Iranian garbage, cared for Iranian elders, and served in Iranian homes. They paid taxes. They followed the rules. But they were never invited to be part of Iran’s national story.
They were allowed to exist. But not to belong.
It was never an oversight. It was a strategy. You may live here, but you will never be “of here.” You may work, but do not ask for protection. You may survive, but do not expect dignity.
Now, that decades-long policy of forced invisibility is being weaponized.
Human Rights Watch has documented patterns of abuse that read like a horror script: arbitrary detention, extortion by authorities, beatings, family separations, and middle-of-the-night expulsions to remote and dangerous border zones. Amnesty International reports that deportees are often dumped in areas plagued by violence, with no resources or support.
Iran’s economic freefall is the backdrop. Decades of sanctions have strangled the country. Inflation has soared. Repression has intensified. When authoritarian regimes face internal collapse, they do what authoritarian regimes always do – they find scapegoats.
Afghans have no legal rights, no voting power, and no diplomatic backing. They are the perfect targets.
As a psychotherapist, I have worked with people whose lives have been shattered by exile. Displacement is not just a wound. It is a chronic condition. It eats away at the core of a person.
Time distorts. The future dissolves.
The body is on constant alert. Children raised in this state grow up not knowing safety, only vigilance. Adults lose the ability to imagine life beyond survival. It becomes hard to dream. It becomes hard to rest. It becomes hard to feel like a full human being.
That is the quiet violence of state-sponsored erasure. It doesn’t just kill bodies, it unravels souls.
The international community is watching this unfold and doing almost nothing. UNHCR has issued statements that sound like press release templates. Western governments nod in the direction of concern but offer no action. There are no emergency summits, no further sanctions tied to human rights abuses, no moral outcry.
Why? Because Afghan refugees are not convenient victims. They do not fit the neat narratives of heroism or victimhood that the West finds compelling. They are not dressed in the right trauma. They are not dying in the right ways. They are too poor, too brown, too silent, too many.
This is how erasure works. Not through violence alone, but through silence, through looking away, and through forgetting.
To the Afghan diaspora: If you have a voice, use it. If you have status, wield it. If you have safety, do not hoard it. This is not someone else’s fight. This is ours.
To Iranian allies: Many of you have risked everything to challenge your government’s brutality. You stood up for women’s rights, for freedom of speech, and for political prisoners. Stand up now for the Afghan families who swept your streets, sat in your classrooms, worked in your construction sites. They were part of your society, even if your government never acknowledged them.
To the global human rights community: Stop pretending this is complicated. It is not. It is violence against the stateless. It is the dehumanization of the already invisible. It is a moral failure in slow motion.
Iran once gave my family shelter, and for that, I will always be grateful. But gratitude is not a gag order.
What is happening now demands outrage. It demands intervention. It demands an honest reckoning with the hypocrisy of global refugee policy, and with our own failure to hold governments accountable when the victims are poor, foreign, and inconvenient.
Afghan refugees are not ghosts. They are not debris. They are not disposable.
They are human beings. And they deserve to be seen.
Nahid Fattahi, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and adjunct faculty member at Pacific Oaks College. Her work focuses on holistic, culturally responsive mental health care. She’s been featured in outlets like The San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Beast, Ms Magazine, US News, and Psychology Today.
