But since the start of this year, over 1.2 million people have been expelled, according to data from the UN refugee agency, with the number of returns surging since Israel launched strikes on Iran on 13 June.

“These young women or even children that are deported from Iran … would face forced marriages and all sorts of other violations by the Taliban and their regime,” Zaki Haidari from Amnesty International Australia told SBS News.

“Millions of women are going back to the same regime they once fled with a hope of finding a safe place. Now they’re just facing the same human rights violations,” he said.

‘Targeted by reason of gender’

Since taking power, Taliban authorities, who also ruled the country between 1996 and 2001, had “severely deprived” girls and women of the rights to education, privacy and family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion, ICC judges said.

Among the expelled Afghans are thousands of lone women. Source: AAP / Muhammad Balabuluki

A day earlier, the United Nations General Assembly denounced the “systematic oppression” of women and girls in Afghanistan by the country’s Taliban authorities.

Member states called on the Taliban “to swiftly reverse contradictory policies and practices,” including laws that “extend the already intolerable restrictions on the human rights of women and girls and basic personal freedoms for all Afghans”.

“What has come in the past four years is more restrictions on women’s rights, human rights violations, lack of employment, hunger and poverty.”

Defying the Taliban

“These girls were putting their lives at risk, but they had just one hope to complete their education to grade 12 and then to be independent,” he told SBS News.

“I consider her my hero.”