Iran forces Afghan refugees out, leaving many women without hope for freedom.

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At the Islam Qala border town between Iran and Afghanistan, busloads of people are arriving.

They are Afghan refugees, who, since being told by Iranian authorities in late May to leave or face arrest, have crossed the border in their millions.

Among them are distressed families, and countless lone women and girls.

Iran is home to an estimated 4 million Afghan migrants and refugees. Many have lived there for decades.

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.

The Red Cross said on Tuesday it is bracing for another million.

“The majority didn’t have a say in coming back,” Sami Fakhouri, head of delegation for Afghanistan at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said.

“They were put on buses and driven to the border.”

But displaced women and girls, in particular, are being returned to a system of extreme repression and destitution under laws imposed by the Taliban — a strictly conservative Islamist armed group that took control of the country in 2021.

“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’

The International Criminal Court on Tuesday issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, accusing them of crimes against humanity over the persecution of women and girls.

Judges said that there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani of committing gender-based persecution.

“While the Taliban have imposed certain rules and prohibitions on the population as a whole, they have specifically targeted girls and women by reason of their gender, depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms,” the court said in a statement.

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.

Women wearing head coverings sit together on metal box in an open area outside

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.

A resolution was adopted on Monday by 116 votes in favour, with 12 abstentions. The United States and Israel voted against.

The text expresses “serious concern about the grave, worsening, widespread and systematic oppression of all women and girls in Afghanistan by the Taliban.”

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”.

But some human rights groups are hesitant to show optimism.

“Change hasn’t come in the past four years, it won’t come,” Haidari said.

“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

While girls in Afghanistan are banned from education beyond grade six, many defy Taliban laws by attending underground schools.

Photographer and human rights activist Muzafar Ali visited the secret network of schools — along with underground training centres for nursing and midwifery — while in Kabul last year.

“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.

“Taliban were putting restrictions on women, and simultaneously women were resisting those restrictions. They were refusing to give up their hopes and dreams and continue their education.”

He also witnessed female-led resistance in the west of the city.

“I saw women running small businesses — one 11-year-old selling an ice cream right near this Taliban check post by the brigade,” he said.

“I consider her my hero.”

Still, he fears deeply for those who are being returned “to no school and no prospect of having a free life”.

“A lot of these refugees were raised in Iran, they were born in Iran, and they got an education in Iran, they were working in Iran, and all of a sudden these women come to Afghanistan, where the Taliban welcomed them with a lot of restrictions,” he said.

“It shatters their dream.”

— With additional reporting from Reuters and Agence France-Presse.