« They threw us out like garbage »: Iran rushes deportation of 4 million Afghans before deadline
Women forced back to living under the Taliban’s increasingly repressive regime have spoken of their desperation as Iran accelerates the deportation of an estimated 4 million Afghans who had fled to the country.
In the past month alone, more than 250,000 people, including thousands of lone women, have returned to Afghanistan from Iran, according to the UN’s migration agency. The numbers accelerated before Sunday’s deadline set by the Iranian regime for all undocumented Afghans to leave the country.
The Taliban, who returned to power in 2021, have been accused of enforcing a system of gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Women returning to the country must live with oppressive laws that ban them from showing their faces, speaking or appearing in public, as well as being excluded from most jobs and education. Anyone caught breaking these rules faces public flogging.
Speaking to the Guardian and Zan Times, an Afghan news agency, at a border crossing in southern Afghanistan, Sahar*, 40, is travelling with five children and says she has no idea where she will live now. A widow originally from Baghlan, a city in northern Afghanistan, she had been living in Iran for more than a decade. She ran a small tailoring workshop and had recently put down a deposit on a home. Last week, she says she was detained, taken with her children from a refugee camp near the southern city of Shiraz, and deported.
“I didn’t even get to pack their clothes. They came in the middle of the night. I begged them to give me just two days to collect my things. But they didn’t listen. They threw us out like garbage.”
Until recently, women were rarely forcibly returned from Iran. Men, often undocumented labourers, were more likely to face arrest and deportation. But Afghan border officials say there has been a recent shift, with at least 100 unaccompanied women deported through a single border point in Nimroz province, in the south of the country, between March and May this year.
TANIKO Madagascar 