This summer, the Islam-Qala border crossing between Iran’s Razavi Khorasan province and Afghanistan’s Herat province has presented a bleak scene as the Iranian regime has violently expelled Afghans across the border. In the region’s punishing July heat, Iranian authorities dragged sick people from hospitals, took children from home schools, and handcuffed men – old and young alike – at low-wage labor sites. They were all deported en masse.
In a single day in June, 26,000 people were forced to leave Iran, arriving on foot at the Afghan border. The official figure, as estimated by the United Nations, is that as many as half a million people were deported from Iran to Afghanistan within a 16-day window this summer. That figure has continued to rise. In total, some 1.5 million people are believed to have been deported from Iran.
The Iranian regime had set a July 6 deadline to achieve its goal of deporting all undocumented Afghans – around 4 million migrants, marking a record of mass forced displacement in the 21st century.
This wave of unprecedented removals was triggered by the Israel–Iran conflict, but it’s part of a trend that stretches back over four decades.
Some of the Afghan migrants forced into Herat from Iran have effectively been deported to a foreign country. The first waves of Afghan refugees sought safety in Iran in 1979, and raised a new generation of Afghans who had never been to Afghanistan. For others – former Afghan government employees, both civilian and military – Herat was an all-too-familiar city, policed by enemies whom they had resisted for 20 years alongside the United States.
Then there are the women, for whom Afghanistan is an inhospitable due to the Taliban’s strict “gender apartheid.”
Afghanistan and Iran used to be shared imperial territory. They have strong ties in culture, language, and history, shaped over thousands of years. Many Afghan speak the same language as Iranians, Farsi, and a portion of them, particularly Hazaras, are part of the same Islamic sect, Shia.
Yet in modern Iran, refugees from Afghanistan are seen as separate – almost a foreign species. Throughout the modern history of Iran, factions within Iranian society have held on to the “otherness” of Afghans. Many in Iran dehumanized the Afghan refugees and periodically, Iranian provinces would ban them from entering. The prejudice extended beyond government action, into the realm of public opinion. In one infamous case, a bakery put up a sign proclaiming: “We do not sell to Afghans.”
The persistent, pervasive, and unchallenged dehumanization of Afghan refugees has led to their exploitation and mistreatment in Iran. Younes Heydari, a 1990s survivor of a notorious deportation camp in Fariman, detailed his experience of surviving intense and cruel mistreatment of deportees by Iranian police in a book titled “Leaden Days.” He chronicled the deportation process – being detained without legal reason, put on a bus, humiliated and subject to intense torture in the camps.
The book, published by an Iranian progressive magazine, Asoo, served as a testimony to the long-standing mistreatment of migrants in Iran. While it was published in the 1990s, both the legal framework for migrants and their treatment by the authorities has remained unchallenged, and Heydari’s horrific experiences look all too familiar to Afghans today.
Fazela, who paid a smuggler to enter Iran with her family of four, settled on the outskirts of Qazwin four years ago. She was about to undergo a medical operation, for which the family had paid $12,000, when the police detained the entire family. They were later transferred from the police station to a deportation camp.
“They were beating people [inside the deportation camp] with a metal bar,” said Fazala, who went by a single name. She was deported in October 2024.
The war triggered by the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan pushed millions into oil-rich Iran. Afghanistan remained unstable for almost half a century thereafter. During this period Iran has been a constant player: supporting Afghans against the Soviet Union, then backing one Afghan faction against another one during the civil war in the 1990s, and finally supporting the Taliban in overthrowing the U.N.-recognized Afghan government in Kabul in 2021.
Throughout those decades, Afghans have constantly found their way into Iran both to make a living and to find a place of relative calm during each escalating episode of instability. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021 pushed almost 1.2 million Afghans to seek refuge in Iran.
Despite the long history of Afghan refugees, Iran declined to create systems of legal protection or support. But Iran’s authorities have stood firmly in opposition to welcoming or offering legal protection even to those whose parents were born and raised in Iran. Instead, Tehran engendered a system of exploitation.
Millions of people with roots in Afghanistan have served as cheap laborers in Iran. In 2004, two decades into Afghanistan’s long period of instability and amid the rise of a third generation of Afghan refugees in Iran, then Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s administration enacted a ban on formal education for undocumented foreign nationals. Just three years earlier, a different directive had allowed Afghan children to enroll in school. It was a vital reversal that set the trajectory of the refugees’ lives firmly into the cheap labor pool. Instead of empowering Afghan refugees, the ban kept the second and third generation of refugees trapped in the bottom of Iranian society, impoverished and uneducated.
Many Afghan refugees created home schools to help their children escape poverty. But in recent years, students at these underground schools were periodically banned from participating in university entrance exams. Beyond a handful of individuals who managed to access formal education, the main population of refugees remained trapped in low-wage labor.
Because the state refused to protect them, private companies were free to exploit them. Afghan refugees were paid poorly for the most undesirable and harsh jobs as construction workers, custodians, manufacturing workers, and farmers.
But the greatest exploitation came from the state: The Iranian regime early on formed a brigade of refugees and dispatched them to the frontlines of Iran’s wars in Iraq and Syria. When Iraq’s Saddam Hussein initiated an invasion in 1980. Tehran tunneled refugees to fight his armies under a religious banner. Decades later, as Iran sought to realize its own imperial aspirations in Syria, the regime forced refugees, including children as young as 14, to the frontline of under the Fatemiyoun brigade. Afghans were threatened them with deportation if they didn’t fight.
Today, as Iranian society churns with its own turmoil and strife, Tehran is using refugees as a public scapegoats. The dehumanization of refuges has resurfaced among the public and in the streets. Anger and frustration at the state of affairs in Iran is easily directed at the “other.”
The Iranian opposition, especially progressive groups, has blamed the regime for scapegoating refugees, but many others have pitched in to revel in it. On social media, such as X (formerly Twitter), Iranian accounts have spewed a constant stream of vitriol, demeaning anything related to Afghanistan – from the diversity of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups to Afghan cultural dress. Iranian newspapers have published articles detailing vile and unfounded stories in which Afghans are labeled as child rapists or murderers of women, and blamed for terror attacks inside Iran.
After its failure to prevent Israeli strikes in June, Iran accused Afghans of being spies for Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. Connecting Afghan refugees to Israel intensified public calls for the deportation of refugees. The Iranian regime called on the public to help with arresting, documenting, and deporting them.
Many Afghan social media users blamed the vitriol for two murders. The body of a 26-year-old Afghan woman was found mutilated, as was the body of a young Afghan man. Many among the Afghan refugee population believe that other murder cases remain unreported, given the illegal status of the victims.
In response to the intense dehumanization of refugees, many in Afghanistan have started to call for the deportation of refugees with dignity at least – but in vain. Homira Qaderi, a writer from Herat, said: “Deport, Do not Kill,” posting a photo of a man who was killed in a deportation camp.
For weeks, thousands of Afghans have arrived on foot to cross the border from Iran to Afghanistan. The deportees arrive in a crisis-ridden and dysfunctional state ruled by the Taliban, a government that is both unable and unwilling to offer support for those returning. Instead, ordinary people have stepped in to help the deportees. Herat’s public has mobilized to help them with transportation and food, among other things.
“Tomorrow is Friday, what a nice day to do a deed,” Qudus Khatabi, a resident of Herat, posted on Facebook. “We sincerely invite anyone who has a vehicle; please bring it to help transport refugees from the border. It is rough days, but it is the least we can do.”
Under the blistering July heat, as refugees returned to Afghanistan under the most difficult circumstances – some ejected from the only country they’ve known, others returning after having sacrificed everything for an opportunity to work and live in Iran – many Heratis opened their hearts. Mohammad Nikzad, a Herat resident, stood on the side of the street and gave away sheryakh, a traditional Afghan ice cream.
But he could only offer sheryakh to 1,100 people, out of more than a million deportees.