When she heard the knock on her hotel room door, Khadija Haidary was with her husband and their nearly four-year-old son in Islamabad, still trying to recover from their third failed attempt to leave Pakistan legally.
The man standing outside wore black. On his shirt, in English, were the words “Stay calm.”
He spoke Farsi and asked Khadija’s husband to step outside. A few minutes later, her husband returned and told Khadija that the man was from the police.
From the fourth-floor window of the Oriel Hotel in Islamabad’s G-9 area, Khadija looked down and saw a white police vehicle. Her hands and feet began to shake. She gathered what she could: passports, copies of their exit permits, tazkiras, cash, and a few clothes for their son. When she looked again, the white vehicle had been replaced by a black, open-back truck — the kind that Afghan refugees in Pakistan have come to fear. Among Afghans, Khadija said, it is known as the Haji Camp vehicle.
She took a photo and sent it to me.
“The police have come,” she wrote.
By the time I saw her messages in Canada, she had already been taken to Haji Camp, a pre-deportation centre in Islamabad. Her phone soon went silent.
Khadija is the managing editor of Zan Times, the Afghan women-led newsroom I founded in exile. She fled Afghanistan in October 2024 after receiving threats from the Taliban for her journalism. Her work with Zan Times has helped document Taliban abuses against women and girls, including policies and practices that human rights experts call crimes against humanity. Returning to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan would not be safe for her. It could mean imprisonment and torture, to say the least.
Yet on April 21, Pakistani police arrested her, her husband, and their child while they still held a valid exit permit to leave Pakistan.
For 60 hours, they were detained in Haji Camp. They were fingerprinted, photographed, and placed on a deportation list to Afghanistan.
Their case shows a growing danger facing Afghan refugees in Pakistan: Even those with passports, visas, tickets, exit permits and pending resettlement cases can be blocked from leaving, then detained and threatened with deportation to the country from which they had fled.
Khadija and her family had been waiting in Pakistan while her Canadian resettlement case was being processed. Like many Afghan journalists, women’s rights defenders, activists and former government employees who fled after the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, she believed Pakistan would be a temporary place of refuge.
By early 2026, that refuge had become increasingly precarious.
Pakistan’s crackdown on Afghan refugees, which began in 2023, has intensified after Pakistan has declared “open war” against the Taliban administration in Afghanistan. According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, “police have expanded operations against Afghan communities in several Pakistani cities, carrying out door-to-door raids, late-night home searches, and arrests without warrants.”
“Abusive police practices are forcing people to forgo food and health care while mass deportations are returning refugees to possible persecution and worse in Afghanistan,” stated Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch, in the report.
In January, Khadija’s landlord told her to leave the apartment where she and her family had been living in hiding for nearly a year. That was when we began searching for a way out of Pakistan for Khadija and her family.
I suggested Tanzania, one of the few countries still issuing visas to Afghans and a place where Canada has an embassy. Khadija could continue her resettlement process from there, away from the daily fear of police raids and deportation.
She agreed.
But leaving Pakistan required money. Zan Times is a small newsroom. After U.S. funding cuts in 2025, we had lost half of our budget and were already struggling to pay journalists for their work. There was no emergency line item in our budget for moving a colleague and her family out of Pakistan.
I reached out to Haley, a friend and a long time supporter of Zan Times. The single mother, who lives in the U.S., had followed our work for years and understood the danger Afghan women journalists face. When I explained Khadija’s situation, Haley agreed to help with the costs.
With her help, we secured tourist visas for Khadija and her family, paid a substantial overstay fine, obtained a Pakistani exit permit, and booked a flight.
The first flight we booked was set to depart from Jinnah International Airport in Karachi at around 4 a.m. on February 26. They had valid passports, valid visas, valid tickets, and a valid exit permit.
Pakistani officials denied them boarding.
They were told they could only return to Afghanistan.
With the help of Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on Afghanistan, we shared Khadija’s case with UNHCR officials in Pakistan, who then spoke with Pakistani officials. We were told the problem was that the family did not have a hotel booking in Tanzania and had a return ticket to Pakistan. If those issues were addressed, we were told, they could book a new flight and would be allowed to leave.
We did that.
On February 28, Khadija and her family tried again.
Again, they were denied boarding.
This time, officials said that because they had entered Pakistan on medical visas, they could not travel to a third country such as Tanzania. They could only return to Afghanistan.
After the second failed attempt, Khadija and her family left Karachi and took a taxi nearly 20 hours to Islamabad. Their exit permit expired. We applied for another one. A month later, they received it.
On April 20, we booked a third flight, this time from Islamabad.
Again, they were stopped.
The next day, police came to their hotel.
At Haji Camp, officials began registering their names and collecting passports. Their phones were confiscated. They went through Khadija’s phone and deleted her pictures and videos that documented her arrest. They even checked her WhatsApp and deleted the picture she sent from her arrest.
They were transferred behind a large iron gate that was locked behind them.
Then they were taken for biometric scans. Their fingerprints were taken. Their photographs were taken.
For Khadija, that was the moment when fear deepened into something worse. Women inside later told her that once someone was biometrically registered, it meant they were being deported.
Men were separated from women and children. Khadija’s husband was taken upstairs to the men’s section. Khadija and her son were sent to the women’s area.
Outside the women’s rooms, several women sat in the sun, pleading for their phones. One young woman was crying. She said she had been there for several days and needed medicine.
“I am sick,” she said. “They will not give me my phone.”
Khadija was placed in a locked room with other women and children. The windows were sealed. The air moved only because ceiling fans were turning. The attached washroom was almost unusable: the floor was slick with filth, one sink was blocked, and one toilet overflowed when water was poured into it. The smell spread into the room where women and children were expected to sleep.
Dirty blankets were piled in wall cupboards.
Khadija wanted to cry, she later told me, but tried not to in front of her son.
That night, men entered the women’s room with a policewoman and counted them. Later, disposable bowls of rice and roti were brought in. Khadija could not eat. Her son would not eat either. Someone gave him a biscuit while Khadija was given a glass of water.
After the women were asleep, she felt she could not breathe. Her son slept beside her on a dirty blanket, his head on a pillow that smelled so bad she could not identify the odour.
She cried quietly.
She thought of Torkham, the border crossing into Afghanistan. She imagined being handed over to the Taliban.
Then she heard the morning call to prayer.
She was relieved that one night had ended.
Outside the camp, those hours were a race against time.
Khadija was allowed only five minutes with her phone. Her phone had only one percent battery. She recorded two voice messages before it died. In one, she told me they might be deported on Monday, April 27.
Her exit permit was set to expire at midnight on April 24. We had to get her out before then.
By that point, press freedom and human rights networks had already begun mobilizing. When Khadija was first denied boarding in February, I had informed the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF), asking for support and guidance.
We had also been communicating with Exile Hub to explore another route out of Pakistan. When they learned about the arrest, they informed Free Press Unlimited (FPU). Soon, CPJ, RSF, FPU, and PEN were coordinating their efforts on her case. FPU helped us hire a lawyer and take the case to court. Richard Bennett wrote to UNHCR, human rights organizations in Pakistan, the Canadian embassy, and Canadian immigration officials, urging them to act. AGHS Legal Aid Cell in Pakistan also stepped in to help secure Khadija’s release. Some people who helped asked not to be named.
Friends in Canada contacted the embassy, immigration officials, and members of Parliament. Afghan journalists and activists in Pakistan organized their own efforts. Journalists from China who had previously worked with Khadija created their own support network.
What unfolded was not one intervention, but many — simultaneous, urgent, and persistent.
On the third night in Haji Camp, around 10 p.m., an officer came in.
“Khadija,” he said. “Take your child and your things and come out.”
She did not believe they were being released.
Outside, her husband was waiting with two men who introduced themselves as the lawyers we had sent. They were released on condition to leave Pakistan before their exit permit expired. They had only two hours. I booked them a flight for 3:30 a.m. on April 24.
They rushed to the airport.
Haji Camp was close to Islamabad airport, but the timing was brutal. They had only minutes to pass through the airline counter and immigration because their exit permit would expire at midnight as the date changed from April 23 to April 24.
After three failed attempts, Khadija did not believe Pakistani officials would let them go.
A few minutes before midnight, they arrived at the immigration. Munizae Jahangir, a prominent Pakistani journalist, had negotiated Khadija’s safe passage from the airport. Their passports quickly stamped at three different counters. When the clock hit 12 a.m. on April 24, they crossed through immigration.
“It was like a miracle,” Khadija said in a voice message.
That is how they escaped being deported to Afghanistan.
Only when Khadija finally sat inside the plane, did she allow herself to believe they were leaving Pakistan.
She was no longer in the deportation camp. She was no longer waiting to be handed back to the Taliban. She could breathe again.
Khadija’s case exposes a dangerous and underreported reality for Afghan refugees in Pakistan: even those with passports, visas, exit permits, airline tickets, and pending resettlement pathways can be blocked from leaving, detained, fingerprinted, and threatened with deportation to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
As we write this, Khadija and her family have settled in Tanzania.
Khadija keeps thinking of the women she met in Haji Camp: the woman crying for her phone and her medicine; the mothers trying to calm their children in locked rooms; the women who wrote on the walls because no one outside could hear them.
