On Friday, June 13, when Israeli missiles started raining down on Tehran, Shamsi was reminded as soon as once more simply how weak she and her household are.
The 34-year-old Afghan mom of two was working at her stitching job in north Tehran. In a state of panic and worry, she rushed again house to search out her daughters, aged 5 and 7, huddled beneath a desk in horror.
Shamsi fled Taliban rule in Afghanistan only a yr in the past, hoping Iran would supply security. Now, undocumented and terrified, she finds herself caught in yet one more harmful scenario – this time with no shelter, no standing, and no manner out.
“I escaped the Taliban however bombs have been raining over our heads right here,” Shamsi instructed Al Jazeera from her house in northern Tehran, asking to be referred to by her first identify solely, for safety causes. “We got here right here for security, however we didn’t know the place to go.”
Shamsi, a former activist in Afghanistan, and her husband, a former soldier within the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan earlier than the Taliban returned to energy in 2021, fled to Iran on a short lived visa, petrified of reprisals from the Taliban over their work. However they’ve been unable to resume their visas due to the associated fee and the requirement to exit Iran and re-enter by Taliban-controlled Afghanistan – a journey that will probably be too harmful.
Life in Iran has not been simple. With out authorized residency, Shamsi has no safety at work, no checking account, and no entry to help. “There was no assist from Iranians, or from any worldwide organisation,” she mentioned.
Web blackouts in Tehran have made it laborious to search out data or contact household.
“With out a driver’s licence, we will’t transfer round. Each crossroad in Tehran is closely inspected by police,” she mentioned, noting that they managed to get round restrictions to purchase meals earlier than Israel started bombing, however as soon as that began it turned a lot more durable.
Iran hosts an estimated 3.5 million refugees and folks in refugee-like conditions, together with some 750,000 registered Afghans. However greater than 2.6 million are undocumented people. Because the Taliban’s return to energy and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, hundreds of Afghans, together with activists, journalists, former troopers, and different weak individuals, have crossed into Iran in search of refuge.
Tehran province alone reportedly hosts 1.5 million Afghan refugees – the vast majority of them undocumented – and as Israel focused websites in and across the capital, attacking civilian and army areas throughout the 12-day battle, many Afghans have been starkly reminded of their excessive vulnerability – unprotected and unable to entry emergency help, and even dependable data throughout air raids because the web was shut down for giant intervals of time.
Whereas many fled Tehran for the north of Iran, Afghan refugees like Shamsi and her household had nowhere to go.
On the night time of June 22, an explosion shook her neighbourhood, breaking the home windows of the household’s house. “I used to be awake till 3am, and simply an hour after I fell asleep, one other blast woke me up,” she mentioned.
A whole residential house was levelled close to her constructing. “I ready a bag with my kids’s primary gadgets to be prepared if one thing occurs to our constructing.”
The June 23 ceasefire brokered by Qatar and the US got here as an enormous reduction, however now there are different issues: Shamsi’s household is sort of out of cash. Her employer, who used to pay her in money, has left town and gained’t reply her calls. “He’s disappeared,” she mentioned. “After I [previously] requested for my unpaid wages, he simply mentioned: ‘You’re an Afghan migrant, get out, out, out.’”
The human price of battle
For all Afghans trapped in Iran – each these pressured to flee and those that stayed of their properties – the 12-day battle with Israel has sharply reawakened emotions of trauma and displacement.
Moreover, in accordance with the Iranian well being authorities, three Afghan migrants – recognized as Hafiz Bostani, Abdulwali and Habibullah Jamshidi – have been among the many 610 individuals killed within the latest strikes.
On June 18, 18-year-old Afghan labourer Abdulwali was killed and a number of other others have been injured in an Israeli strike on their building website within the Tehranpars space of Tehran. Based on the sufferer’s father, Abdulwali left his research in Afghanistan about six months in the past to work in Iran to feed his household. In a video extensively shared by Abdulwali’s associates, his colleagues on the building website will be heard calling to him to go away the constructing as loud explosions echo within the background.
Different Afghans are nonetheless lacking for the reason that Israeli strikes. Hakimi, an aged Afghan man from Takhar province in Afghanistan, instructed Al Jazeera that he hadn’t heard from three of his grandsons in Iran for 4 days. “They have been caught inside a building website in central Tehran with no meals,” he mentioned.
All he is aware of is that they retreated to the basement of the unfinished house constructing they have been engaged on after they heard the sound of bombs, he defined. The outlets close by have been closed, and their Iranian employer has fled town with out paying wages.
Even when they’ve survived, he added, they’re undocumented. “In the event that they get out, they may get deported by police,” Hakimi mentioned.
From one hazard zone to a different
Through the battle, UN Particular Rapporteur Richard Bennett urged all events to guard Afghan migrants in Iran, warning of significant dangers to their security and calling for speedy humanitarian safeguards.
Afghan activist Laila Forugh Mohammadi, who now lives exterior the nation, is utilizing social media to lift consciousness in regards to the dire situations Afghans are dealing with in Iran. “Individuals can’t transfer, can’t converse,” she mentioned. “Most haven’t any authorized paperwork, and that places them in a harmful place the place they’ll’t even retrieve unpaid wages from fleeing employers.”
She additionally flagged that amid the Iran-Israel battle, there is no such thing as a authorities physique supporting Afghans. “There’s no paperwork to course of their scenario. We dreaded an escalation within the violence between Iran and Israel for the protection of our individuals,” she mentioned.
Ultimately, those that did handle to evacuate from essentially the most harmful areas in Iran largely did so with the assistance of Afghan organisations.
The Afghan Girls Activists’ Coordinating Physique (AWACB), a part of the European Organisation for Integration, helped a whole bunch of ladies – lots of whom fled the Taliban due to their activist work – and their households to flee. They relocated from high-risk areas like Tehran, Isfahan and Qom – the websites of key nuclear services which Israel and the US each focused – to safer cities akin to Mashhad within the northeast of the nation. The group additionally helped with speaking with households in Afghanistan throughout the ongoing web blackouts in Iran.
“Our capability is proscribed. We will solely help official members of AWACB,” mentioned Dr Patoni Teichmann, the group’s founder, talking to Al Jazeera earlier than the ceasefire. “We’ve evacuated 103 ladies out of our current 450 members, most of whom are Afghan ladies’s rights activists and protesters who rallied towards the ladies’s training ban and fled Afghanistan.”
‘I can’t return to the Taliban’
Iran just lately introduced plans to deport as much as two million undocumented Afghans, however throughout the 12-day battle, some took the choice to maneuver again anyway regardless of the risks and hardships they could face there.
World Imaginative and prescient Afghanistan reported that, all through the 12-day conflict, roughly 7,000 Afghans have been crossing every day from Iran into Afghanistan through the Islam Qala border in Herat. “Individuals are arriving with solely the garments on their backs,” mentioned Mark Cal, a area consultant. “They’re traumatised, confused, and returning to a homeland nonetheless in financial and social freefall.”
The Workplace of the UN Excessive Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has voiced grave considerations in regards to the deteriorating humanitarian scenario for Afghans in Iran, including that it’s monitoring reviews that persons are on the transfer inside Iran and that some are leaving for neighbouring nations.
At the same time as Israeli strikes got here to a halt, tensions stay excessive, and the variety of Afghans fleeing Iran is predicted to rise.
However for a lot of, there’s nowhere left to go.
Again in northern Tehran, Shamsi sits beside her daughter watching an Iranian information channel. “We got here right here for security,” she says softly. Requested what she would do if the scenario worsens, Shamsi doesn’t hesitate: “I’ll keep right here with my household. I can’t return to the Taliban.”
This piece was revealed in collaboration with Egab.
