Millions of Afghans forced to return to a hellscape the world forgot

It’s been a dark summer for Afghans. When Israel launched the 12-day war with Iran on June 13, Tehran used it as a pretext to scapegoat some of its most vulnerable residents.

In its latest wave of deportations, an estimated 700,000 Afghans have returned to Afghanistan since Iran began expulsions that month. Then on July 31, Pakistan launched the third phase of its “Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan,” announced in 2023, arresting and detaining Afghans across the country.

According to the International Organization for Migration, over four million people have returned from Iran and Pakistan to Afghanistan since 2023, with over two million returning just this year. The fourth anniversary of the Taliban takeover on August 15 came and went as Afghans return to a country where the human rights situation has deteriorated over the past four years.

Hunger looms. About half the population, or 23 million people, are estimated to depend on food aid before the end of the year. Among them are 3.5 million children, some of whom were born abroad and have never before set foot in Afghanistan.

And what do they return to?

With a central banking system disconnected by Western sanctions from the international SWIFT banking system and frozen assets, Afghanistan finds itself in a permanent economic crisis.

The country’s humanitarian sector and health system are collapsing. Thousands of public-sector jobs have been cut. Kabul is facing a major housing crisis. And some returnees are vulnerable to being targeted by Taliban fighters. Former government officials, Afghan National Defense and Security Forces soldiers, intelligence officers, police officers, and interpreters who collaborated with NATO forces, journalists, and activists are being abducted, detained, and, in some cases, subject to torture by the Taliban authorities, the United Nations reports.

“Sending people back to a country in which they are at risk of persecution, torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment or other irreparable harm, violates the core international law principle of non-refoulement,” U.N. Human Rights spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said.

And while fewer Afghans have migrated to other Central Asian countries, they haven’t been welcome there either.

Tajikistan has routinely deported Afghans en masse for several years, a process that escalated again in June despite acceding to the 1951 Refugee Convention on the legal rights of refugees, including protections against refoulement when they are at risk of persecution.

The Taliban has publicly denounced the repatriations, Deputy Minister for Refugees and Repatriation Abdul Rahman Rashid calling them a “serious violation of international norms, humanitarian principles, and Islamic values.”

As for Iran, where persistent economic crises had fueled anti-immigrant sentiment, it had already announced before its war with Israel its intention to forcibly repatriate undocumented Afghans if they failed to leave voluntarily by July 6. Unsubstantiated accusations that Afghans were collaborating with Israel’s Mossad offered a convenient excuse for the regime’s security failures during the 12-day war.

“At the height of the war with Israel there was a lot of anger at the security failures of the [Iranian] state apparatus,” Ibraheem Bahiss, a Kabul-based expert for the International Crisis Group, told RS. “[I]t needs to somehow find a red herring to take the blame off.”

The Iranian authorities “used this popular discontent to carry out the [repatriation] policy,” Bahiss said. “It’s made it more difficult to plead with the Iranians to temper their approach.”

For Pakistan, in turn, rounding up Afghans for deportation has been used to pressure the Taliban, Bahiss explained, to halt its alleged support for the resurgence of the Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP), a Pakistan-based insurgency that escalated drone attacks over the summer. The Afghan Taliban has provided the TTP refuge, but Islamabad’s deportation program appears designed primarily to distract its public from its own homegrown extremism problem and security failures.

Last month, Russia became the first country to normalize diplomatic ties with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, an act that Afghanistan Foreign Minister Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi referred to as an “unprecedented step towards Afghanistan’s integration into the international community.” Keen on extending the Belt and Road Initiative into Afghanistan, China stepped up economic diplomacy at the first trilateral meeting with Afghanistan and Pakistan in Kabul last week. Qatar, and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia have exerted a type of humanitarian diplomacy, with Qatar newly striking a deal to employ thousands of Afghans in the wake of Iran’s crackdowns.

Russia has tried to forge a “Grand Bargain” with the Taliban, Bahiss explained, referring to Moscow’s pressure on the predominantly Pashtun Taliban for an ethnically more inclusive government, and trade in the agricultural and fossil fuels sectors. Since the Taliban takeover, Russian presidential envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov expressed a desire for the Taliban to improve the human rights situation, including for women and girls, while insisting that Russia does not intend to interfere in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. Nine countries surrounding Afghanistan are likely to meet in Moscow this fall to discuss relations with Kabul.

A key priority for Russia aligns with that of the Taliban: to defeat the Islamic State and latent insurgencies, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, that have Central Asian countries on alert. The Taliban’s campaigns against Islamic State — Khorasan Province have been lauded by the Muslim World League.

Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry and the Russian Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

“The Taliban leadership need to take responsibility for the ongoing and worsening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan,” Fereshta Abbasi, Asia researcher with Human Rights Watch, said at a press briefing earlier this month. “We have called on states to ensure that human rights are a priority and a core point on the agenda every time that they are meeting with the Taliban.”

A coalition of 90 Afghan and international organizations that have been lobbying the U.N. Human Rights Council to create an independent mechanism to investigate, and if called for, prosecute rights abuses in Afghanistan before the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice.

The ICC has already issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders, Haibatullah Akhundzada and Abdul Hakim Haqqani, based on the crime against humanity of persecution on gender and political grounds. All eyes are now on the EU to address the proposal at the next Human Rights Council session in September.

“It’s a sad thing, but access to countries to do human rights monitoring and documentation is becoming the exception rather than the rule,” Richard Bennett, the Human Rights Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan, said at this month’s briefing. The special rapporteur was barred from Afghanistan last year. “Maybe the Taliban don’t realize the political credit they had been getting by allowing me to visit, which they now lost,” he added.

“It’s a responsibility of all states, not only Western states,” Bennett said. “What’s happening in Afghanistan are crimes against humanity, crimes against the whole of humanity, which should shock our conscience and provoke action by all.”

In the meantime, millions of Afghans are returning to a country that is under repressive rule, where their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and occupations put them at grave risk of becoming another statistic in a report denouncing crimes against humanity. Deportees with criminal records are subject to the Taliban’s interpretation of Sharia law, which legalized public flogging, amputations, stoning, and executions.

“The international community needs to distinguish between the de facto authorities and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the people of Afghanistan,” Abbasi said. “They need to ensure that they are not punishing the people of Afghanistan for the Taliban’s acts.”