“We wanted to put up with the war, but after three weeks, fear weighs in,” Sajjadi said on a recent afternoon as she stepped back into Afghanistan.
Written by Elian Peltier
Fatima Sajjadi crossed the Iran-Afghanistan border last week after a two-day journey, still coughing from the smoke of burning oil in Tehran. A 26-year-old Afghan graduate student in the southern Iranian city of Bushehr, Sajjadi initially resisted going home when the war in Iran started, in part, she said, because of the many restrictions on women imposed by the Taliban government.
But as her dormitory was evacuated, her university closed and her health deteriorated, her parents pressed her to relent.
“We wanted to put up with the war, but after three weeks, fear weighs in,” Sajjadi said on a recent afternoon as she stepped back into Afghanistan.
Sajjadi, a Master of Business Administration student at Persian Gulf University, is one of thousands of students, construction workers, families and others from Afghanistan who have fled the conflict in Iran.
Afghanistan has received the largest influx of people from Iran since the war began in late February — more than 70,000 people over the first two weeks of March, according to the United Nations’ migration agency.
Although they have escaped the immediate danger of U.S.-Israeli strikes in Iran, Afghans are returning to a country struggling with extreme poverty and where the Taliban’s tightening grip on society stifles the futures they were trying to build abroad.
They have also left a country at war only to risk being caught in the middle of another, with Afghanistan and another neighbor, Pakistan, embroiled in conflict.
In interviews with 20 people at the border crossing of Islam Qala in western Afghanistan, and in Herat, the largest city near the border, Afghans said the war has disrupted their educations and jobs, wiping out the safety nets they provided for relatives back home.
With 1,500 people crossing daily, the pace of returns has so far been much lower than last year, when Iran forced nearly 2 million Afghans out and up to 50,000 people crossed every day.
Yet Iranian officials have warned their Afghan counterparts and humanitarian organizations that they should brace for an increase in returns. Expulsions spiked shortly after Iran’s 12-day war with Israel last June amid a surge of xenophobia that aid groups fear may pick up again.
Iran became Afghanistan’s main trading partner last year after Pakistan closed its border with Afghanistan. But the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran has disrupted this partnership.
“Many Afghans rely on daily labor in Iran that can quickly disappear amid the ongoing conflict, and which could become a major driver of returns,” said Charlie Goodlake, a spokesperson for the U.N. refugee agency in Afghanistan. “The country is already at breaking point in terms of reintegration capacity.”
Sajjadi was traveling with a friend, Khalida Ahmadi, and the two women said they were aware of the bleak future awaiting them. The Taliban have banned women from public spaces and most jobs, and nearly half of Afghanistan’s 44 million people need humanitarian assistance. In recent weeks, its cities, including the capital, Kabul, have been hit by airstrikes from Pakistan, which accuses the Afghan government of harboring terrorist groups.
“Kabul has been through war and at the moment, it’s not as bad as Tehran,” said Ahmadi, whose family lives in Kabul. Both said they would go back to Iran as soon as the war there recedes.
Afghan and Iranian officials have said that trade has continued uninterrupted, and a steady flow of trucks has come and gone through the border. More than 22,000 people also crossed from Afghanistan into Iran over the first two weeks of March.
But Afghan drivers said that products imported from third countries through Iranian ports are not coming through. And with money exchangers in both countries unable to communicate with one another, Afghans working in Iran have been unable to send money back home.
“It all goes through us, but we can’t make transfers,” said Abdul Qudos, a money exchanger in Herat, one of Afghanistan’s largest cities and an important hub for trade with Iran.
The U.S.-Israeli strikes have also injured dozens of Afghan workers, returnees said.
Khalil Ahmad lay on a mattress in his mud brick home near Herat one afternoon last week, surrounded by four of his six young children, who had not seen their father in months. Ahmad worked as a street cleaner for the municipality of Tehran, and as he stepped outside one evening recently to go to the bathroom, shrapnel from a strike on a nearby factory hit his left leg and foot, he said.
Ahmad, 35, had been sending $160 home monthly — the family’s only source of income. He made the 700-mile journey from Tehran to the border by bus, on crutches, uncertain if he could ever return to Iran to work.
Internet blackouts in Iran have also cut off families and pushed relatives to travel to the border edge, hoping to catch Iranian cell signals for news of a son or brother.
Abdul Ghafar sat on a mound of gravel by the border and tried to call his brother, who sent the equivalent of $200 a month from his construction job in Iran.
“Those who are in Iran can’t work, or not enough, because of the war,” said Ghafar, as he smoothed wrinkled papers with relatives’ numbers scribbled on them. “Families like us, on the other side, aren’t receiving the money our relatives usually send.”
The mass expulsions of nearly 3 million Afghans from Iran and Pakistan last year had already crippled Afghanistan’s economy and sent housing prices surging in cities like Herat and Kabul because of heightened demand.
The war in Iran is likely to deal the economy yet another blow, analysts say.
The Afghan economy grew by 4.3% last year, according to the World Bank, driven by higher demand for basic goods and housing from returnees. But that sharp population increase has also made individuals poorer: Growth domestic product per capita fell by 4%.
“Iran provided stability and assurance to the Afghan economy, and money transfers were the backbone of household survival,” said Nassim Majidi, the co-founder of Samuel Hall, a research firm based in Nairobi that recently released a report on the cost of deportations in Afghanistan. “It was an informal social protection system in a country where you don’t have any.”
Many Afghans crossing the border last week were coming home to celebrate Eid as part of the holy month of Ramadan. But many others cited fear and insecurity as the main reasons for leaving.
Barakat Ibrahimi, 36, came back with his two aging parents because his mother had issues breathing after the bombing of a petroleum depot in Tehran.
Masouma Husseini, 16, an art student, also fled with her family because of the war. “Painting requires patience, and I wasn’t able to focus,” she said. She said she planned to continue studying painting in Afghanistan online.
But many also said they didn’t know whether they would or could go back to Iran.
Javid Arwati, an Afghan business management student in Tehran, said he had to leave his degree unfinished. “We’ve lost three years,” he said, as he crossed the border.
Sajjadi, the graduate student at Persian Gulf University, said university officials had evacuated their dormitories on the first day of the war out of fear of airstrikes. “We thought civilians might also be targeted,” Sajjadi said, mentioning the U.S. strike on an Iranian school that killed at least 175 people. “Americans do not show mercy.”
Returning to Afghanistan puts her in another bind. “We can’t implement here the knowledge we’ve learned there,” Sajjadi said.
It took only hours for her and her friend, Ahmadi, to face restrictions in Afghanistan. When they reached Herat, a bus company refused Ahmadi a ticket to Kabul, citing a Taliban-imposed rule that bans women from traveling without a male companion.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
