As Iran Deports Afghan Refugees, Many Women Face Diminishing Hopes for Freedom

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The Islam Qala border town between Iran and Afghanistan is seeing an influx of busloads of people arriving.

These individuals are Afghan refugees who have been instructed by Iranian authorities since late May to depart or risk arrest, leading to millions crossing the border.

Included in their numbers are distressed families, along with numerous lone women and girls.

Iran has been home to an estimated 4 million Afghan migrants and refugees, many of whom have resided there for decades.

However, beginning this year, over 1.2 million people have been expelled, according to the UN refugee agency, with the expulsion rate increasing since Israel commenced strikes on Iran on June 13.

The Red Cross said on Tuesday it is bracing for another million.

“The majority didn’t have a say in coming back,” Sami Fakhouri, head of delegation for Afghanistan at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said.

“They were put on buses and driven to the border.”

But displaced women and girls, in particular, are being returned to a system of extreme repression and destitution under laws imposed by the Taliban — a strictly conservative Islamist armed group that took control of the country in 2021.

“Young women or even children deported from Iran face risks of forced marriages and various other violations by the Taliban and their regime,” Zaki Haidari from Amnesty International Australia told SBS News.

“Millions of women are returning to the same regime they initially fled from in search of safety, now encountering the same human rights violations once more,” he stated.

‘Targeted by reason of gender’

The International Criminal Court on Tuesday issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, accusing them of crimes against humanity over the persecution of women and girls.

Judges said that there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani of committing gender-based persecution.

“While the Taliban have imposed certain rules and prohibitions on the population as a whole, they have specifically targeted girls and women by reason of their gender, depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms,” the court said in a statement.

Since taking power, Taliban authorities, who also ruled the country between 1996 and 2001, had “severely deprived” girls and women of the rights to education, privacy and family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion, ICC judges said.

Women wearing head coverings sit together on metal box in an open area outside

Among the expelled Afghans are thousands of lone women. Source: AAP / Muhammad Balabuluki

A day earlier, the United Nations General Assembly denounced the “systematic oppression” of women and girls in Afghanistan by the country’s Taliban authorities.

A resolution was adopted on Monday by 116 votes in favour, with 12 abstentions. The United States and Israel voted against.

The text expresses “serious concern about the grave, worsening, widespread and systematic oppression of all women and girls in Afghanistan by the Taliban.”

Member states called on the Taliban “to swiftly reverse contradictory policies and practices,” including laws that “extend the already intolerable restrictions on the human rights of women and girls and basic personal freedoms for all Afghans”.

But some human rights groups are hesitant to show optimism.

“Change hasn’t come in the past four years, it won’t come,” Haidari said.

“What has come in the past four years is more restrictions on women’s rights, human rights violations, lack of employment, hunger and poverty.”

Defying the Taliban

While girls in Afghanistan are banned from education beyond grade six, many defy Taliban laws by attending underground schools.

Photographer and human rights activist Muzafar Ali visited the secret network of schools — along with underground training centres for nursing and midwifery — while in Kabul last year.

“These girls were putting their lives at risk, but they had just one hope to complete their education to grade 12 and then to be independent,” he told SBS News.

“Taliban were putting restrictions on women, and simultaneously women were resisting those restrictions. They were refusing to give up their hopes and dreams and continue their education.”

He also witnessed female-led resistance in the west of the city.

“I saw women running small businesses — one 11-year-old selling an ice cream right near this Taliban check post by the brigade,” he said.

“I consider her my hero.”

Still, he fears deeply for those who are being returned “to no school and no prospect of having a free life”.

“A lot of these refugees were raised in Iran, they were born in Iran, and they got an education in Iran, they were working in Iran, and all of a sudden these women come to Afghanistan, where the Taliban welcomed them with a lot of restrictions,” he said.

“It shatters their dream.”

— With additional reporting from Reuters and Agence France-Presse.