Hamida* remembers the rhythm of her old life in Mashhad: mornings spent studying marketing and afternoons running a jewellery and handicrafts workshop she had built herself. “I trained others and marketed my own products,” she says in an in-person interview. “I did not feel like a refugee, I was an independent woman and entrepreneur.”
Those years, she says, were defined by “pleasure” and “pride” words that have disappeared from her life since Iran forced her to return to Afghanistan 10 months ago.
“The day of deportation was one of the bitterest days of my life,” she says. “We had to pay to leave. That day, the fee increased by one million toman. I called everyone I knew, but no one helped me.”
Now living in Herat, she is trying to rebuild. She has opened a small shop, but finds that the terms of her life have fundamentally changed. “Working here, especially as a woman, is exhausting,” she says to Zan Times. “When I go to the market, the looks people give me are heavy and disturbing. It makes me regret even trying to grow my business.”
Discrimination also existed during her time in Iran, where Afghan refugees are often given the label of “Atba,” meaning foreign national. But it did not prevent her from studying or working. In contrast, she describes her life in Afghanistan as “dark and bleak.”
“I am mentally completely shattered and depressed,” she says. “Some days I have no motivation to open my shop, no strength even to leave the house. The future for me is unknown and nothing.”
Her experience reflects the reality facing Afghan women who are returning from Iran and Pakistan. Since 2021, the Taliban have imposed sweeping restrictions on women and girls, including banning secondary and higher education, limiting most forms of employment, and enforcing rules that prevent women from travelling without a male guardian. Access to public spaces have narrowed; opportunities have vanished.
At the same time, neighbouring countries have accelerated deportations. Between mid-September 2023 and August 31 of this year, Iran and Pakistan have systematically been deporting Afghans. According to a recent report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) published earlier this month, approximately 6.5 million people returned from those two countries to Iran and Pakistan during that period.
In Pakistan, the main driver behind the forced and voluntary returns is the “Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan,” which the country’s government began implementing in late 2023. Meanwhile, Iran accelerated the deportation of Afghans with the target of expelling two million migrants.
As many of these returnees spent decades — or even their entire lives — in Iran and Pakistan, they face immense difficulties upon their arrival in Afghanistan. Securing housing and shelter, finding jobs and income, and adapting to the laws and societal norms currently governing Afghanistan have been among the most prominent challenges they face.
One woman who has suffered this shocking transition is Hamida. She built an independent life in Iran after divorcing her husband a decade ago in that country. “I learned that separation was not the end, but the beginning of achieving greater things,” she says. Now, she finds herself in a society where the dominant view mirrors that of her former husband: that a woman’s place is inside the home.
In Jalalabad, Seema, 26, is adjusting to a life she barely recognizes. Until 6 months ago, she was in Peshawar completing a master’s thesis in English literature while working two jobs.
“From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., I taught at an English language centre, and then I worked as a dental assistant from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m.,” she says.
Born and raised in Pakistan, Seema says her life there was full of activity and purpose. Then, after more than 30 years in the country, she and her family were expelled following a change in policy targeting undocumented and even some documented Afghans.
“Sometimes I cry a lot at home. I cannot study, I cannot relax,” she says. “There, I went out, I worked, I focused on my research, I studied after work and there were no restrictions. But here, I am psychologically very damaged. Nothing brings me joy.”
For teenage girls, the rupture is even more absolute.
Rokhsar was in year 10 at a school near Islamabad when police arrested and deported her father. “Because we are seven sisters and my brothers are still young, we had to follow him back to Afghanistan,” she says.
Now in Jalalabad, she faces a different kind of confinement. Her father is ill, her 14-year-old brother is the sole breadwinner, selling vegetables from a handcart and she cannot study or work. She recalls her school days in Pakistan in detail: waking early, preparing her uniform, leaving for school at 7.30 “with hope.”
“Here I wake up tired, without motivation or hope,” she says. “Even getting out of bed is difficult. When it is school time, my heart starts to ache. My classmates are close to graduating, but I have been left behind.”
After Afghan universities closed to women, Sara, 27, travelled to Iran to study radiology. “My most ordinary day there was studying alongside men and working in a hospital,” she says.
But she was forced to return due to the Israeli and U.S. war with Iran. “In Afghanistan I don’t feel alive,” she says. “It feels like a dark pit that we girls have fallen into.”
She now faces a stark choice: remain confined, or risk leaving again. “Continuing life in war is easier for me than staying at home, deprived of the right to work, to go out, to study,” she says. “I cannot leave my education unfinished.”
What weighs most heavily, she adds, is not only the loss of opportunity but the erosion of dignity. “No matter how talented we are, as women we are not even seen,” she says. “It destroys our self-respect and confidence.”
Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and writer.
Rad Radan, Hajar Sadat, Tarana Mohammadi & Tomris Tamga are the pseudonyms of a Zan Times journalist in Afghanistan.
Hosai Ismail Khan* is contributed to this report.
