Nowhere to run: The Afghan refugees caught in Israel’s war on Iran
On Friday, June 13, when Israeli missiles began raining down on Tehran, Shamsi was reminded once again just how vulnerable she and her family are.
The 34-year-old Afghan mother of two was working at her sewing job in north Tehran. In a state of panic and fear, she rushed back home to find her daughters, aged five and seven, huddled beneath a table in horror.
Shamsi fled Taliban rule in Afghanistan just a year ago, hoping Iran would offer safety. Now, undocumented and terrified, she finds herself caught in yet another dangerous situation – this time with no shelter, no status, and no way out.
“I escaped the Taliban but bombs were raining over our heads here,” Shamsi told Al Jazeera from her home in northern Tehran, asking to be referred to by her first name only, for security reasons. “We came here for safety, but we didn’t know where to go.”
Shamsi, a former activist in Afghanistan, and her husband, a former soldier in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan before the Taliban returned to power in 2021, fled to Iran on a temporary visa, fearful of reprisals from the Taliban over their work. But they have been unable to renew their visas because of the cost and the requirement to exit Iran and re-enter through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan – a journey that would likely be too dangerous.
Life in Iran has not been easy. Without legal residency, Shamsi has no protection at work, no bank account, and no access to aid. “There was no help from Iranians, or from any international organisation,” she said.
Internet blackouts in Tehran have made it hard to find information or contact family.
“Without a driver’s licence, we can’t move around. Every crossroad in Tehran is heavily inspected by police,” she said, noting that they managed to get around restrictions to buy food before Israel began bombing, but once that started it became much harder.
Iran hosts an estimated 3.5 million refugees and people in refugee-like situations, including some 750,000 registered Afghans. But more than 2.6 million are undocumented individuals. Since the Taliban’s return to power and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, thousands of Afghans, including activists, journalists, former soldiers, and other vulnerable people, have crossed into Iran seeking refuge.
Tehran province alone reportedly hosts 1.5 million Afghan refugees – the majority of them undocumented – and as Israel targeted sites in and around the capital, attacking civilian and military locations during the 12-day conflict, many Afghans were starkly reminded of their extreme vulnerability – unprotected and unable to access emergency assistance, or even reliable information during air raids as the internet was shut down for large periods of time.
While many fled Tehran for the north of Iran, Afghan refugees like Shamsi and her family had nowhere to go.
On the night of June 22, an explosion shook her neighbourhood, breaking the windows of the family’s apartment. “I was awake until 3am, and just an hour after I fell asleep, another blast woke me up,” she said.
An entire residential apartment was levelled near her building. “I prepared a bag with my children’s main items to be ready if something happens to our building.”
The June 23 ceasefire brokered by Qatar and the US came as a huge relief, but now there are other problems: Shamsi’s family is almost out of money. Her employer, who used to pay her in cash, has left the city and won’t answer her calls. “He’s disappeared,” she said. “When I [previously] asked for my unpaid wages, he just said: ‘You’re an Afghan migrant, get out, out, out.'”
For all Afghans trapped in Iran – both those forced to flee and those who stayed in their homes – the 12-day conflict with Israel has sharply reawakened feelings of trauma and displacement.
Furthermore, according to the Iranian health authorities, three Afghan migrants – identified as Hafiz Bostani, Abdulwali and Habibullah Jamshidi – were among the 610 people killed in the recent strikes.
On June 18, 18-year-old Afghan labourer Abdulwali was killed and several others were injured in an Israeli strike on their construction site in the Tehranpars area of Tehran. According to the victim’s father, Abdulwali left his studies in Afghanistan about six months ago to work in Iran to feed his family. In a video widely shared by Abdulwali’s friends, his colleagues at the construction site can be heard calling to him to leave the building as loud explosions echo in the background.
Other Afghans are still missing since the Israeli strikes. Hakimi, an elderly Afghan man from Takhar province in Afghanistan, told Al Jazeera that he hadn’t heard from three of his grandsons in Iran for four days. “They were stuck inside a construction site in central Tehran with no food,” he said.
All he knows is that they retreated to the basement of the unfinished apartment building they were working on when they heard the sound of bombs, he explained. The shops nearby were closed, and their Iranian employer has fled the city without paying wages.
Even if they have survived, he added, they are undocumented. “If they get out, they will get deported by police,” Hakimi said.
During the conflict, UN Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett urged all parties to protect Afghan migrants in Iran, warning of serious risks to their safety and calling for immediate humanitarian safeguards.
Afghan activist Laila Forugh Mohammadi, who now lives outside the country, is using social media to raise awareness about the dire conditions Afghans are facing in Iran. “People can’t move, can’t speak,” she said. “Most have no legal documents, and that puts them in a dangerous position where they can’t even retrieve unpaid wages from fleeing employers.”
She also flagged that amid the Iran-Israel conflict, there is no government body supporting Afghans. “There’s no bureaucracy to process their situation. We dreaded an escalation in the violence between Iran and Israel for the safety of our people,” she said.
In the end, those who did manage to evacuate from the most dangerous areas in Iran mostly did so with the help of Afghan organisations.
The Afghan Women Activists’ Coordinating Body (AWACB), part of the European Organisation for Integration, helped hundreds of women – many of whom fled the Taliban because of their activist work – and their families to flee. They relocated from high-risk areas like Tehran, Isfahan and Qom – the sites of key nuclear facilities which Israel and the US both targeted – to safer cities such as Mashhad in the northeast of the country. The group also helped with communicating with families in Afghanistan during the ongoing internet blackouts in Iran.
“Our capacity is limited. We can only support official members of AWACB,” said Dr Patoni Teichmann, the group’s founder, speaking to Al Jazeera before the ceasefire. “We have evacuated 103 women out of our existing 450 members, most of whom are Afghan women’s rights activists and protesters who rallied against the women’s education ban and fled Afghanistan.”
Iran recently announced plans to deport up to two million undocumented Afghans, but during the 12-day conflict, some took the decision to move back anyway despite the dangers and hardships they may face there.
World Vision Afghanistan reported that, throughout the 12-day war, approximately 7,000 Afghans were crossing daily from Iran into Afghanistan via the Islam Qala border in Herat. “People are arriving with only the clothes on their backs,” said Mark Cal, a field representative. “They’re traumatised, confused, and returning to a homeland still in economic and social freefall.”
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has voiced grave concerns about the deteriorating humanitarian situation for Afghans in Iran, adding that it is monitoring reports that people are on the move within Iran and that some are leaving for neighbouring countries.
Even as Israeli strikes came to a halt, tensions remain high, and the number of Afghans fleeing Iran is expected to rise.
But for many, there is nowhere left to go.
Back in northern Tehran, Shamsi sits beside her daughter watching an Iranian news channel. “We came here for safety,” she says softly. Asked what she would do if the situation worsens, Shamsi doesn’t hesitate: “I will stay here with my family. I can’t go back to the Taliban.”
This piece was published in collaboration with Egab.
Al Jazeera
