Aamir Muhammad has barely left his house for weeks; neither have his neighbours. In his ramshackle neighbourhood on the outskirts of the Pakistani city of Quetta, where thousands of Afghan refugees have made their home, the fear is palpable.
Like many here, Muhammad, 47, is an illegal refugee who fled Afghanistan after the country fell to the Taliban in 2021.
Fearing the brutality of the Taliban regime, and for the safety of her children, he and 14 family members escaped across the border and have lived in Quetta ever since. They live in extreme poverty in Pakistan, all together in one basic mud hut, but he can find work and food, and his wife has freedom unavailable to her in Afghanistan.
But Muhammad now fears being snatched from his home by police. Earlier this month, the Pakistan government made an unexpected announcement that all migrants living without legal status to remain in Pakistan had to leave within 28 days, or they would be arrested and expelled.
Though Afghans were not mentioned directly, it was clear they are the target of the draconian policy, and thousands have been rounded up and harassed since then.
Muhammad says all that awaits him in Afghanistan is death. “Life is not possible there – we won’t get a shelter for our family nor will we have resources to earn there,” he says.
“Even if the Pakistani authorities arrest me and send me [to Afghanistan], I will try to come back,” he adds.
According to the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR), there are almost four million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan, 700,000 of whom fled after the Taliban regained power more than two years ago. About 1.7 million are deemed to be in Pakistan illegally, with little legal protection or means to get asylum.
Since the return of the Taliban, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated into an all-out humanitarian and human rights crisis. The Taliban have enforced a regime of brutality and oppression, particularly for women, who have been banned from education, work and many public places. Poverty and starvation in the country has reached critical levels.
To make matters worse, the country experienced its deadliest earthquakes in decades last weekend, killing more than 3,000 people and causing unfathomable destruction in already deprived villages.
The mass deportations are being seen as a direct response to the growing hostility between the Pakistan government and the Taliban regime, which Islamabad blames for the recent deadly and uncontrollable resurgence of Islamist terrorism in Pakistan.
Recent attacks have largely been carried out by Afghan militants belonging to the Pakistan Taliban and Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate, both of which wage war on Pakistan for not enforcing sharia law strictly enough and have hideouts in Afghanistan.
Taliban officials in Afghanistan have also ignored appeals by the Pakistan government to help stop cross-border terrorism. Last month, bombs at mosques in the Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa regions – both of which border Afghanistan – killed almost 60 people, while in July, a suicide bomber at a political rally killed 44 people. IS was believed to be responsible for the attacks.
Shahzada Zulfiqar, a political analyst based in Quetta, says the government is using the mass deportations to send a message to Kabul. “The main objective of this crackdown is to pressure the Afghan Taliban government to stop supporting the Pakistani Taliban,” he said.
“Afghan nationals had carried out 14 of 24 suicide bombings in Pakistan this year,” Zubair Jamali, the Balochistan state home minister, said. “They are involved in destabilising the country and it won’t be tolerated.”
While Jamali insisted that most of the deportations had been “voluntary”, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UNHCR condemned the rounding up of refugees, which they said was mostly targeting the most vulnerable people in slums and poorer neighbourhoods.
The UN warned that those who were deported faced “serious protection risks upon return”.
According to officials, at least 2,600 Afghan refugees have already been deported through the Chaman crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and thousands more have been detained.
Even Afghan refugees living in the country legally have been detained or are now in hiding, fearful of also being detained. Landlords in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, have reported receiving notices telling them to evict “illegal Afghans” by the end of the month or face action.
Rewards have been offered for those who turn in Afghan refugees and clerics at mosques have been told by police to convey to their congregations the need to report on Afghans living illegally in their neighbourhoods.
In Quetta, Hassam ud-Din, a 20-year-old building labourer, is a Afghan refugee who is in Pakistan legally but he was still arrested by police and threatened with deportation, before lawyers from the IOM intervened.
“Police stopped us and even though we showed them our cards, they told us, ‘you people don’t belong here, you are not from Pakistan’ and arrested us,” he says. “In the early hours, police were sending vans of people to the border and we were so fearful we would be next.”
For 70-year-old Muhammad Khan, who came to Pakistan during the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s and has lived in Quetta ever since with his children, and now his grandchildren, the prospect of being sent back had him reeling.
“We have our life here, how could we go back and start again in Afghanistan, where everything is uncertain?” he says.
