This is the last part of a year-long project in which Doug Saunders explores the global migration crisis, and the political and economic forces driving it. Learn more inIt was 11 p.m. when the men holding assault rifles began pounding on the front gate of Parastoo Mubariz’s walled house in Kabul. She turned off all the lights, crept to the back rooms, and told her five children, ages 1 to 14, to lie still and be very silent.
In the summer of 2021, the United States pulled its military out of Afghanistan and the Taliban abruptly swept into Kabul, seizing control of the government, imposing their strict religious restrictions on daily life and sending an estimated 1.6 million people fleeing in fear. In 2023, Pakistan turned against the Afghans in its borders. The interim military government launched a program last year to expel all Afghans living in Pakistan without residency papers, and eventually all Afghans and their offspring regardless of documentation, ostensibly on the grounds that local Afghans are associated with a string of terrorist incidents .
Some of the Afghans who spoke with The Globe came from military backgrounds, such as Abdul Manan Azizi, who found work as a tailor and volunteer teacher in Karachi. As conflict refugees, they are in the company of about six million Ukrainians who cannot return to their invaded country, most living in Central and Western Europe; 6.5 million Syrians who have been forced by dictator Bashir al-Assad’s crushing of their democratic uprising to flee to other countries ; and 1.4 million Sudanese who have escaped violence mainly for other parts of Africa.
Once at the border, he explained, the migrants are handed off to other smugglers who facilitate their passage into Iran and onward to the Turkish border. Maria struggled to keep the baby quiet, and the teenage boys, giddy with excitement, chatted loudly – too loudly, it turned out. As they approached the house, they were suddenly blinded by police floodlights, then handcuffed and loaded into police vans. Maria and Orhan were held in a freezing police cell for a week, then deported back to western Afghanistan. “If you come to the border again,” the police told her, “we will know what to do with you.
The decision by Pakistan’s military regime to deport all Afghans without legal residency appears to have driven many onto the Iran-Turkey route. Turkey reported in 2023 that it was home to about 300,000 undocumented Afghan migrants, many on their way to Europe, and European authorities reported that the overland migration route from Turkey through Greece and Bulgaria had surpassed the Mediterranean route from Africa in traffic, bringing tens of thousands of Afghans into Europe.
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