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As Iran Deports a Million Afghans, ‘Where Do We Even Go?’

Middle East|As Iran Deports a Million Afghans, ‘Where Do We Even Go?’

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/world/middleeast/iran-deportations-afghanistan.html

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At the sand-swept border between Iran and Afghanistan, nearly 20,000 are crossing every day — shocked and fearful Afghans who have been expelled from Iran with few belongings in a wave of targeted crackdowns and xenophobia.

More than 1.4 million Afghans have fled or been deported from Iran since January during a government clampdown on undocumented refugees, according to the United Nations’ Refugees agency. More than half a million have been forced into Afghanistan just since the war between Israel and Iran last month, returned to a homeland already grappling with a severe humanitarian crisis and draconian restrictions on women and girls, in one of the worst displacement crisis of the past decade.

They are being dumped at an overcrowded border facility in western Afghanistan, where many expressed anger and confusion to New York Times journalists over how they could go on with few prospects in a country where some have never lived, or barely know anymore.

“I worked in Iran for 42 years, so hard that my knees are broken, and for what?” Mohammad Akhundzada, a construction worker, said at a processing center for returnees in Islam Qala, a border town in northwestern Afghanistan, near Herat.

Map locates the Islam Qala crossing at the border of Afghanistan and Iran.