Thematic Focus

Historically, Iran has been home to many Afghan refugees and migrants – some of them fleeing persecution, while others are in search of work and migrating cyclically. This includes a sizeable Hazara community who are also Shi’a – like the majority of Iran – and face ongoing persecution at the hands of the Taliban. Iran relies on Afghan labour, but it still profoundly discriminates against them. In this context, the country has been ambivalent at best and hostile at worst towards Afghans.

Deportations of Afghans from Iran have become increasingly prevalent. According to reports, over 559,000 Afghans were deported in 2024, marking an 18 percent increase compared to the previous year. During 2025, the situation has intensified further, with Iran carrying out deportations at an unprecedented and extraordinary speed. According to the Centre for Human Rights in Iran, “Iran is casting out entire communities – men, women, and children – based on prejudice and politics, to a country where their lives and most basic rights are under immediate threat.”

Torkham Border, Nangarhar, Afghanistan, 8 November, 2023. Drone footage shows thousands of Afghans returning from Pakistan. Pakistan’s push for Afghans to leave the country has intensified since 2023, forcing hundreds of thousands to return amid growing safety and rights concerns, particularly for women and girls.

On 28 May 2025, Nader Yar-Ahmadi, head of Iran’s Interior Ministry’s Office for Foreign Nationals and Immigrants, announced that Afghans were required to leave Iran by 6 July 2025. Formally, this deadline applied to Afghans without valid residency documents or those whose temporary census registration papers had expired, although evidence suggests authorities have been indiscriminate, in what could more accurately be described as targeted “Afghan phobia”. Ultimately, as many as 4 million undocumented Afghans could be affected.

The timing was striking. Just over two weeks later, on 13 June 2025, Israel launched surprise attacks on key military and nuclear facilities in Iran, assassinated prominent military leaders, nuclear scientists and politicians, and damaged or destroyed Iran’s air defences. This marked the beginning of the so-called Twelve-Day War, which ended on 24 June, when a ceasefire was agreed.

While deportations paused briefly during the initial days of the war, they quickly resumed with force, sweeping up both documented and undocumented Afghans across multiple Iranian cities. Indeed the Twelve-Day War triggered one of the largest forced movements of the decade. State media incited violence, labelling Afghans “traitors” and accusing them of spying for Israel. Allegedly, some Afghans confessed on television to spying and were used to justify a harsh deportation drive of the whole community in what has been described as unlawful collective punishment.

This aftermath of the war has resulted in what the MMC warned would be the “mounting weaponisation of anti-Afghan sentiment.” In just 16 days across June and July, over 500,000 Afghans were expelled, including many thousands of unaccompanied children. Apart from the emotional trauma of sudden upheaval and forced return, people speak of rough handling, shredding of personal documentation, insults, beatings and abuse by the security forces.

The 2025 deportation numbers, spiking in the wake of the Twelve-Day War, are alarming but the action is part of a longer-term policy aim of the Iranian government to expel up to 4 million Afghan nationals from Iran out of an estimated 4.5 million. At the same time, Iran has been building a concrete and barbed wire wall along its lengthy eastern borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, allegedly to stem the flow of irregular migration as well as intercepting smuggled drugs and fuel and combatting the possible entry of IS or other terrorist groups. Reportedly, the Iranian “parliament is also planning for a national migration organisation” that would take over its efforts to crack down on irregular migration.

For Afghans, the scapegoating that has intensified in the aftermath of the Israel-Iran conflict is not new. Afghans have long been blamed by Iranians as the cause for poor national economics and unemployment. In late 2024, reports documented hundreds of deaths and disappearances at the Afghan-Iran border, with Iranian border guards using live rounds against people crossing. Almost all Afghan returnees interviewed in 2025 by the Mixed Migration Centre in Afghanistan identified police, military and officials as the primary perpetrators of human rights violations during their return journeys.

Afghanistan has been riven with decades of civil and international war and is among the countries with the highest levels of multidimensional poverty, especially in conflict-affected regions, with the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (2022-2023) reporting that 64.9 percent of the population lives in poverty. Between January and September 2024, UNHCR conducted over 110,000 monitoring interviews in Iran, revealing that many Afghans fled there due to economic hardship, food insecurity, uncertainty about the future, health issues, restrictions on female education and a lack of access to essential services.

As people are desperate to leave Afghanistan, the sudden return of so many Afghans from Iran – some of whom have never lived in their homeland – is creating both a socioeconomic crisis as well as a multi-layered human rights crisis. Afghans are not only being expelled from Iran, but from Pakistan too, in a mass expulsion drive started in 2023 under Pakistan’s Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan. To a lesser degree, Afghans are also being expelled from Tajikistan. There, in early July 2025, the government instructed all Afghan nationals (refugees or otherwise) to leave within 15 days. Meanwhile, Türkiye expelled over 6,000 Afghans in the first four months of 2025.

While just hundreds have left Tajikistan to date, over a million Afghans have left Pakistan since 2023 – many more recently under intensified pressure and intimidation – with 200,000 leaving between May and June 2025 alone. The majority (80%) of those expelled are irregular in status in all three countries, a characteristic used by the respective governments to justify their actions and a fact confirmed by those returnees themselves when recently interviewed in Afghanistan. The asylum space and channels for legal migration in all these countries are vanishingly small, and options for protection when the state is organising expulsions at this scale are minimal.

The UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, Mai Sato, warned that “Afghanistan remains unsafe under Taliban rule. These mass returns violate international law and put vulnerable people, especially women, children, and minorities, at severe risk of persecution and violence.”

Under the Taliban, women and girls are systematically deprived of their rights and are particularly at risk upon their return, where undue restrictions imposed on them have the cumulative effect of preventing them from accessing basic services and, effectively, erasing them from public life. Others among those deported include journalists, former civil servants, rights activists and employees of the previous Afghan government, who are particularly exposed to reprisals and torture upon their return – let alone having little opportunity to find work, shelter and support to survive in what the UN’s Human Rights office calls Afghanistan’s “acute humanitarian and human rights crisis”.

See also

Afghan Returns