War in Iran Forces 70,000 Afghans Home to Taliban Rule

Akhtar Mohammad fled Kabul after the Taliban returned to power in 2021, terrified his daughters would grow up without rights or futures. He moved his family to Iran. Then the bombs started falling there, too. "We realized we weren't safe in Iran either," he said.

His story has become the defining experience of hundreds of thousands of Afghans trapped between two collapsing realities. The war in Iran has forced at least 70,000 Afghan workers and students back to Afghanistan, severing what had been the country's main economic lifeline and depositing displaced people into a nation already under Taliban control, where nearly 65 percent of the population lives in poverty.

The scale of the Afghan presence in Iran makes the disruption enormous, even if the exact numbers are contested. The Migration Policy Institute estimated that as of mid-2024, Iran was the world's largest refugee host, sheltering 3.8 million people, 99 percent of them Afghan. Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, Amir Saeed Iravani, put the figure far higher, estimating over six million Afghans in the country at the end of 2024. UNHCR uses a more conservative figure of approximately 1.65 million refugees and others in need of international protection. The divergence reflects both definitional differences and the massive scale of undocumented migration: of the 3.8 million figure cited by the Migration Policy Institute, roughly 750,000 were registered refugees and more than 2.6 million were undocumented.

Those undocumented Afghans are now in the most precarious position. Many avoided registration deliberately, fearing deportation or hoping to move onward to Europe or elsewhere. That calculation has now collapsed. Zahra Sepehr, head of the Netherlands-based AWA Legal and Social Foundation, described Afghan refugees stranded in Tehran, unable to leave the city because they lack residency documents. They cannot return to Afghanistan safely and cannot legally remain where they are.

The dangers of the journey home are severe. In late 2024, Iranian border guards used live rounds against people crossing into Afghanistan, with reports documenting hundreds of deaths and disappearances at the border. Nearly all Afghan returnees interviewed in 2025 by the Mixed Migration Centre identified police, military and government officials as the primary perpetrators of human rights violations during their return journeys.

Afghanistan offers little relief. The Taliban imposes severe restrictions on women's rights and education, meaning Afghan women who fled specifically to escape those conditions face a grim homecoming. The country's Hazara community, Shia Muslims who have long faced Taliban persecution, is particularly vulnerable. UNICEF has warned that supply chain disruptions caused by the regional conflict are delaying life-saving therapeutic food for malnourished children.

The crisis has deep historical roots. Afghans have been moving to Iran in waves since the Soviet invasion in 1979. More than one million fled there after the Taliban retook Kabul in 2021, the fastest Afghan exodus in modern history. Iran has alternated between absorbing that labor and exploiting it, relying on Afghan workers while subjecting them to discrimination and periodic mass deportations.

If the war in Iran intensifies and displacement accelerates, Turkey and Iraq are the most likely next destinations, though both already carry heavy refugee burdens. UNHCR staff are mobilizing from Iran and Afghanistan to Lebanon and Syria as the regional crisis deepens, a signal of how broadly humanitarian planners expect the fallout to spread.

Afghans fleeing Iran now constitute a population with no good options: a country at war behind them, and a country under the Taliban ahead.