HAMRAH Network member Zan Times has published an investigation into the women and girls being deported into gender apartheid. The findings should change how governments assess return decisions.
Since September 2023, roughly 6.5 million people have returned to Afghanistan from Iran and Pakistan, according to an IOM report published in early October. The movement has been driven by two state programmes: Pakistan’s Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan, launched in late 2023, and Iran’s accelerated deportation drive, which aims to expel two million migrants.
These figures are usually discussed in the language of migration management — caseloads, processing capacity, reintegration support. On 2 October, Zan Times published reporting that makes that language impossible to sustain.
What return means for a woman
The investigation follows four women deported from Iran and Pakistan over the past two years. Each had built a life elsewhere that Afghanistan now makes illegal.
Hamida ran a jewellery and handicrafts workshop in Mashhad, Iran, for years before her forced return ten months ago. “I did not feel like a refugee,” she told Zan Times. “I was an independent woman and entrepreneur.” She describes the day of her deportation as “one of the bitterest days of my life” — no one she called was willing to help. In Herat now: “I am mentally completely shattered and depressed.”
Seema, 26, was completing a master’s thesis in English literature in Peshawar while working two jobs. Her family was expelled from Pakistan after more than thirty years. “Sometimes I cry a lot at home. I cannot study, I cannot relax.”
Rokhsar was in year 10 at a school near Islamabad when her father was arrested and deported, pulling the family back to Jalalabad. She is one of seven sisters. None of them can study past primary level. Her 14-year-old brother is now the household’s main breadwinner, selling vegetables from a handcart. “Here I wake up tired, without motivation or hope,” she says. “My classmates are close to graduating, but I have been left behind.”
Sara, 27, had left for Iran specifically to study radiology after the Taliban closed Afghan universities to women. Now in Afghanistan, “I don’t feel alive. No matter how talented we are, as women we are not even seen.”
This is a protection issue
Since 2021, the Taliban have banned secondary and higher education for girls and women, closed most categories of employment to them, and required a male guardian for women’s travel. The ICC has now unsealed arrest warrants against four Taliban leaders for crimes against humanity committed through exactly this architecture of restriction.
A woman deported to Afghanistan is not being returned to a country with a difficult human rights record. She is being transferred into a legal order that the international criminal justice system has formally characterised as gender persecution.
What HAMRAH Network is asking
The Economic and Social Development Organisation, a HAMRAH member, works with women returnees in female-headed households, providing legal aid and helping them secure documentation and navigate the justice system. Set against the scale of 6.5 million returns, it is a fraction of what is needed.
We are calling for the following:
- Gender-specific risk assessment should be standard in every Afghan return decision, recognising the Taliban’s education, employment, and movement bans as individualised persecution rather than general country conditions.
- Donors engaging the Taliban on returns or reintegration should not treat those discussions as separable from the gender persecution now under ICC investigation.
- Forced returns of Afghan women and girls should be suspended in Iran and Pakistan.
We recognise the work of Zan Times and its women journalists, and we will keep supporting our members in building the evidence that protection and accountability require.
Read the full investigation: zantimes.com/2026/10/02/our-wings-have-been-cut-the-reality-facing-women-forced-back-to-afghanistan/
