While Austria’s Ministry of the Interior plans to intensify cooperation with the Taliban government in Afghanistan on deportations, Iran and Pakistan have already forcibly returned millions of Afghans to Taliban-controlled territory in recent months — amid a worsening humanitarian, political, and human rights crisis in the country.
Under Taliban rule, women and girls are banned from education beyond the sixth grade and excluded from public employment, and nearly 23 million people require urgent humanitarian assistance. The situation has been worsened by a series of natural disasters, including a recent earthquake that killed more than 2,200 people and injured thousands more in the eastern provinces. In this article, I speak with Mahshid Mawj, a women’s rights activist and educator who fled to Pakistan after being tortured by the Taliban in 2023, only to be deported in July 2025. I also interviewed Ashur, a Hazara father who was forced to return from Iran with his wife and two children. Their experiences reveal the harsh realities faced by returnees to a homeland that many no longer recognize.
Unemployment and Rising Rents
In June, after three days stranded in Mashhad, Iran, Ashur and his family were put on a crowded bus headed toward Afghanistan’s Islam Qala border crossing. Along with hundreds of other Afghans, they carried deportation papers, a few belongings, and heavy uncertainty about what awaited them on the other side of the border. Back in Kabul, 36-year-old Ashur struggles to feed his family and pay rent, all while watching his teenage daughter’s chance to continue her education slip away. Originally from the Behsud district of Maidan Wardak province, Ashur lives in a rented home in Kabul with his two children and elderly mother.
Ashur moved to Iran in 2003 and has spent most of his life there, where he married an Afghan woman, worked in a steel company, and sent his two children—a son, 16, and a daughter, 13—to school, despite bureaucratic hurdles and local hostility toward Afghans. In 2025, Iran canceled his family’s headcount registration and gave them just weeks to leave.
For Ashur and thousands of Afghan refugees in Iran, life offered relative stability, but never certainty. Schooling required endless paperwork, and locals often viewed Afghans with suspicion. Despite earning a steady income, Ashur’s family endured a constant sense of insecurity.
“My daughter keeps telling me that all those years of school in Iran were wasted,” he says. “As a father, it is painful to see her future cut short, but there is nothing I can do.” Today, back in Kabul, Ashur faces unemployment and rising rent prices. The promise of returning home has given way to despair. “All doors are closed for Afghans. Iran no longer issues visas. Pakistan is worse, and we have no resources to go anywhere else,” he adds.
Women at Risk
Ashur’s fears for his daughter’s future are echoed in the experience of Mahshid Mawj, a 45-year-old activist and former educator who was deported from Pakistan in July 2025. While Ashur’s return highlights economic collapse and school closures, Mawj’s story reveals the risks faced by women who defy the Taliban—and the deep sense of betrayal many returnees feel after years of service to Afghanistan.
A mother of three, Mawj’s life has been marked by cycles of loss and exile. As a teenager, during the Taliban’s first rule, she was forced into marriage, which cut her education short. More than two decades later, her children now face a similar disruption. Her eldest daughter, a journalism student until 2021, was forced to abandon her studies and flee for France. Her 20-year-old son now lives in hiding after escaping Pakistani police during her deportation. Her five-year-old daughter trembles at the sight of men in uniform.
“Exactly when the Taliban returned, my daughter was 21 and studying journalism,” she recalled. “Every time I looked at her, I suffered—knowing the same suffering I endured during the first Taliban rule would now repeat for her. History is repeating itself on Afghan women.” Mawj remembers the days when the Taliban first took power in 1996. “They took education from me,” she recalls, her voice trembling. “And now they are taking it from my daughter. Afghan women do not deserve to beg on the streets.”
Arrest and Exile
In 2023, Mahshid Mawj fled to Pakistan after being arrested and beaten by the Taliban for running secret schools that taught girls lessons on subjects other than religion. Despite warnings to teach only religious lessons, she continued her work, hiding books and materials to protect her students. When the Taliban raided her home, she resisted and was beaten, suffering a broken tooth and injured knee before being released on bail due to her severe health condition.
In July 2025, she was deported back to Afghanistan with her five-year-old daughter, while her 20-year-old son has managed to evade detention. Since her return, Mawj has been moving frequently to avoid Taliban scrutiny. Rents are unaffordable, jobs are scarce, and daily life is increasingly precarious for returnees like her. “I even opened secret schools for girls,” she says. “Teaching them at home so the Taliban wouldn’t notice. We risked everything just so girls could learn.”
Financial support and personal security remain her main concerns. She relies on occasional remittances from a friend in Germany but does not see this as sustainable. Constantly on the move, she takes precautions to avoid Taliban arrest and to protect herself and her young daughter. “The Taliban took the key from me—my education. But this is not just my destiny. It is the destiny of millions of Afghan women.”
Surviving the Return
Both Iran and Pakistan have hosted the largest number of Afghan refugees since the mass exodus began with the Soviet invasion in 1979. Since that time, both countries have supported different Mujahidin groups to secure their strategic interests. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence has played a critical role in channeling Western financial and military resources to anti-Soviet fighters, and in the 1990s, this support was central to the rise of the Taliban.
Today, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR ) data, the two countries host nearly six million Afghans. Once welcomed, many now face unlawful detention, police raids, deportations, and harassment—a reality both Ashur and Mawj have experienced firsthand. According to the UNHCR, more than 2.5 million Afghans returned from neighboring countries in 2025 alone, nearly two million from Iran and over half a million from Pakistan. Deportees face widespread detention and family separation, with limited and precarious access to safety, housing, jobs, and basic services. Mawj herself was separated from her son during deportation, her belongings confiscated by a landlord near Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.
Inside Afghanistan, the risks are significant. Mawj says that girls, women, and minorities face the most severe threats. With no functioning rule of law, she argues, people have nowhere to turn to receive: “For women and girls, institutions that should provide support simply do not exist, leaving them exposed and vulnerable. Her frustration extends beyond Afghanistan. Mawj accuses the international community of enabling Taliban power through engagement, while Afghan women are forced into poverty, early marriage, or begging.
Meanwhile, Ashur worries about unemployment and his children’s education: “If my two children have a better future, that is enough,” he says. “Afghanistan today is a hell for women, and for a minority family like mine. My only wish is that girls, including my own daughter, could study, go to university, and work without fear.”