Walwala, a refugee from Afghanistan, is in seventh grade and attends school in Peshawar, Pakistan’s capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, along with her sister. As their family prepares to return to Afghanistan, both sisters are anxious and deeply worried about their future in a country where girls’ education is banned beyond sixth grade.
“My sister and I can’t stop worrying about it,” Walwala said. “We know our lives will be confined inside the house, and it breaks our hearts.”
Their parents have already packed their belongings and plan to depart for Afghanistan in the first week of May. Walwala’s father is also panic-stricken. “I don’t have enough money to rent a truck. We don’t have a home there. I don’t know how I will support my family, my children, and won’t be able to attend school,” he said, listing several other concerns.
Afghans who are being forcefully expelled from Pakistan will face many hardships, including limited access to education, especially for girls, widespread unemployment, restrictions on personal freedoms, and inadequate medical care. Many young Afghans, born and raised in Pakistan, are confronting a future they have never known.
The thought of this upheaval weighs heavily on Zahoor (name changed for security reasons), a TikTok influencer with millions of followers. With his long hair, stylish beard, and fashionable outfits, Zahoor became well-known for his videos featuring Pashto songs. But now, he fears he will have to abandon both his online persona and personal style. The Taliban regime has already banned TikTok, western-style haircuts, fashionable beards, and music—although long hair has not been officially outlawed.
“I think my whole life will change there; I will have to change myself,” he told me.
For the past forty years, millions of Afghans fleeing successive wars have made Pakistan their home, building new lives in exile. While many worked as laborers, others managed to start businesses, pursue education, raise families, and find a measure of peace and stability. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), however, Afghans in Pakistan routinely face discrimination, limited access to formal education, employment, or buying property, and lack of legal protections—conditions that already render their lives precarious.
This fragile stability began to unravel in 2022, when peace talks between the Pakistani government and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)—brokered by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan—collapsed. In the aftermath, terrorist attacks surged across Pakistan, and authorities increasingly blamed Afghanistan and the Taliban for supporting the TTP. Officials alleged that many of these attacks were planned inside Afghanistan, with Afghan nationals implicated in some suicide bombings. In response, Pakistan launched an aggressive repatriation campaign. In 2023, the government introduced a stringent one-document regime, sealed its border with Afghanistan, and ordered all undocumented Afghans and foreign nationals to leave.
Pervez Khan was a young man when he migrated to Peshawar with his wife nearly four decades ago. Today, as he prepares to leave Pakistan, he is surrounded by a large family—six sons, three daughters, who are all married, and dozens of grandchildren. “In the four decades since I migrated to Pakistan, neither I nor any of my children have returned to Afghanistan. Leaving now feels like being forced to leave my own homeland,” Pervez said, selling fruit from his cart in Peshawar.
For Pervez, like many others, Pakistan is home. Returning to Afghanistan feels like migrating to an unfamiliar, foreign land. “We’ve endured every hardship over the past forty years, but through hard work, we managed to build meaningful lives here,” he said. “Now, going back to Afghanistan means starting all over again from scratch.”
Although Pervez says there is currently no crackdown on Afghan refugees in Peshawar, he is exhausted by the constant warnings and statements from Pakistani officials. The province’s Chief Minister, Ali Amin Gandapur, recently announced that Afghan refugees would not be expelled from his province. Gandapur, a member of former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, openly criticized the current government under Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, calling its refugee policy “faulty.”
Human rights groups like Amnesty International have condemned the forced repatriation, recognizing that the government’s actions come “amid a campaign to wrongfully demonize Afghan nationals as so-called criminals and terrorists”. Currently, this process continues in most provinces, particularly in the cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, except for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where voluntary returns are still taking place.
Elsewhere, authorities have issued final deadlines for the return of Afghan refugees holding Proof of Registration (PoR) cards, a government issued identity document that entitled Afghans to legally remain in Pakistan. Crackdowns are ongoing against undocumented Afghans and those holding Afghan Citizen Cards (ACC).
According to UNHCR spokesperson Qaisar Afridi, Pakistan currently hosts 1.3 million Afghans with PoR cards, 800,000 with ACCs, and 210,000 who arrived after Kabul’s fall in 2021. Authorities estimate that around 800,000 Afghans remain undocumented.
The crackdown is already taking an economic toll. Afghan businesses—as well as Pakistani businesses in Pashtun-majority cities like Peshawar and Quetta—are suffering severe losses. Agha Gul Khilji, a member of the Quetta Chamber of Commerce, warned that the departure of Afghan traders would devastate the city’s economy.
“Afghan refugee traders are engaged in property, import-export, and various other businesses in Quetta. If they are forced to leave, it will severely impact the local economy,” Khilji said
In the heart of Peshawar, Abdul Razaq, president of the Qissa Khwani Bazaar, expressed similar concerns. “Many shopkeepers in Qissa Khwani Bazaar are Afghans, and if the government expels them by force, it will have a serious impact on our businesses,” Razaq said.
The forced expulsion of Afghan refugees from Pakistan will push hundreds of thousands of families into an uncertain future. Among those who will bear the greatest burden are Afghan women and girls, whose lives under Taliban rule are shaped not by personal choice but by rigid restrictions imposed by the regime. Returning refugees will face a reality where educational opportunities end after sixth grade for girls, economic prospects are bleak, healthcare is inadequate, and social freedoms are heavily curtailed.
As they leave behind the relative stability and opportunities they built over decades in Pakistan, Afghan families are being thrust into a harsh and constrained environment, one where the dreams of young women, in particular, may be stifled for generations to come.
(Khudai Noor Nasar is a journalist and documentary filmmaker with over 18 years of experience covering in Afghanistan and Pakistan)