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 concern, she rushed again dwelling to seek out her daughters, aged 5 and 7, huddled beneath a desk in horror.
Shamsi fled Taliban rule in Afghanistan only a 12 months in the past, hoping Iran would supply security. Now, undocumented and terrified, she finds herself caught in one more harmful scenario – this time with no shelter, no standing, and no means out.
“I escaped the Taliban however bombs had been raining over our heads right here,” Shamsi informed Al Jazeera from her dwelling in northern Tehran, asking to be referred to by her first title 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, terrified 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 via Taliban-controlled Afghanistan – a journey that will doubtless be too harmful.
Life in Iran has not been straightforward. 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 stated.
Web blackouts in Tehran have made it onerous to seek out info or contact household.
“With no driver’s licence, we will’t transfer round. Each crossroad in Tehran is closely inspected by police,” she stated, 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, 1000’s of Afghans, together with activists, journalists, former troopers, and different weak individuals, have crossed into Iran looking for 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 places throughout the 12-day battle, many Afghans had been starkly reminded of their excessive vulnerability – unprotected and unable to entry emergency help, and even dependable info throughout air raids because the web was shut down for big durations 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 condominium. “I used to be awake till 3am, and simply an hour after I fell asleep, one other blast woke me up,” she stated.
A whole residential condominium was levelled close to her constructing. “I ready a bag with my youngsters’s essential 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 stated. “After I [previously] requested for my unpaid wages, he simply stated: ‘You’re an Afghan migrant, get out, out, out.’”
The human price of battle
For all Afghans trapped in Iran – each these compelled to flee and people who stayed of their houses – the 12-day battle with Israel has sharply reawakened emotions of trauma and displacement.
Moreover, in response to the Iranian well being authorities, three Afghan migrants – recognized as Hafiz Bostani, Abdulwali and Habibullah Jamshidi – had 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 had been injured in an Israeli strike on their development website within the Tehranpars space of Tehran. In keeping with 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 pals, his colleagues on the development website might be heard calling to him to go away the constructing as loud explosions echo within the background.
Different Afghans are nonetheless lacking because the Israeli strikes. Hakimi, an aged Afghan man from Takhar province in Afghanistan, informed Al Jazeera that he hadn’t heard from three of his grandsons in Iran for 4 days. “They had been caught inside a development website in central Tehran with no meals,” he stated.
All he is aware of is that they retreated to the basement of the unfinished condominium constructing they had been engaged on once they heard the sound of bombs, he defined. The retailers close by had 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 stated.
From one hazard zone to a different
Throughout 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 rapid humanitarian safeguards.
Afghan activist Laila Forugh Mohammadi, who now lives outdoors the nation, is utilizing social media to lift consciousness in regards to the dire situations Afghans are going through in Iran. “Folks can’t transfer, can’t converse,” she stated. “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 forms to course of their scenario. We dreaded an escalation within the violence between Iran and Israel for the security of our individuals,” she stated.
Ultimately, those that did handle to evacuate from essentially the most harmful areas in Iran principally did so with the assistance of Afghan organisations.
The Afghan Girls Activists’ Coordinating Physique (AWACB), a part of the European Organisation for Integration, helped tons of of girls – 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 equivalent 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 are able to solely assist official members of AWACB,” stated Dr Patoni Teichmann, the group’s founder, chatting with Al Jazeera earlier than the ceasefire. “We’ve evacuated 103 girls out of our current 450 members, most of whom are Afghan girls’s rights activists and protesters who rallied towards the girls’s schooling ban and fled Afghanistan.”
‘I can’t return to the Taliban’
Iran not too long ago 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 struggle, roughly 7,000 Afghans had been crossing day by day from Iran into Afghanistan by way of the Islam Qala border in Herat. “Persons are arriving with solely the garments on their backs,” stated Mark Cal, a subject 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 may be 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 printed in collaboration with Egab.