At midnight on Saturday, Alma* stood at the check-in counter at Karachi airport in Pakistan with her husband and three-year-old son, holding tickets she believed would finally take the refugee family to safety.
The Afghan journalist, who fled the Taliban in October 2024, had already been stopped from boarding two days earlier, on 26 February. Since they were flying with a tourist visa to a country in Africa, they had booked a flight from Karachi with a return leg that they did not plan to use. But the Pakistani officials at the airport refused to let them board.
