Millions of people are returning to Taliban-run Afghanistan
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Property agent Bakhtiar Niazai is at the heart of the world’s biggest reverse migration and business is booming.
Tens of thousands of Afghan citizens are returning from Pakistan each month, many of them pouring into Jalalabad, an Afghan city near the border. The city’s population has doubled in the past two years to 600,000, as have monthly rents, now 4,000 afghanis ($60) for a two-room house.
“I’m making a great commission,” said Niazai from his office in Daman bazaar, on the outskirts of Jalalabad. His good fortune — and the fact that a midsized Afghan city has one of the world’s hottest property markets — is one facet of the country’s demographic shock.
Over the past year, Iran and Pakistan have sent about 3mn Afghans back after decades and sometimes lifetimes in exile, according to the UN, 150,000 alone in the past six weeks. Afghanistan’s population is up 12 per cent from 40mn in 2023, when Islamabad and Tehran began mass deportations.
More are to come. Iran and Pakistan are scaling up deportations of their Afghan populations, a huge logistical, economic and humanitarian challenge for a country wracked by widespread poverty after four decades of war and ruled by the hardline Taliban.
The returnees are entering a nation devastated by two earthquakes that killed thousands in the east last year, facing tensions with Pakistan that have sparked air strikes and reeling from the loss of roughly $1bn in annual aid from the US.
UN officials warn these crises may trigger another exodus to the west and fuel conflict within Afghanistan and beyond.
“Most people returning have no prospects,” said Arafat Jamal, representative for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Afghanistan. “After nine months, they’re ready to bounce back on to the road, to Iran, Turkey and further onwards to Europe.”
He added: “That’s if they’re not being lured into some other nefarious activity by different militant groups that are roaming the country. Their salaries are quite good, up to $500 per month. The man doesn’t need to be ideological. If you need to care for your family, it’s either about finding a job, moving elsewhere or joining one of these forces.”
Afghanistan is absorbing the consequences of a half-century of external interventions — Soviet and Nato — and civil wars that repeatedly displaced millions who are now being forced back en masse. The influx is straining the nation’s overstretched schools and hospitals, driving up rents and depressing wages.
So many people are arriving that in Jalalabad, Niazai began stocking milk powder because many returnees prefer the thicker Pakistani teas to the local green kahwah, he said. Dozens of clients stream into his office every day, complaining of rising rents or eviction notices from landlords who have found desperate returnees willing to pay premium rates for lodging. “There will be tensions,” Niazai said.
While higher spending on food, housing and basic services translated into 4.3 per cent overall economic growth in Afghanistan in the year to March 2025, individuals have grown poorer: in per capita terms, GDP shrank 4 per cent because of the ballooning population, according to the World Bank.
Last year, Pakistan deported 1.1mn Afghan nationals. As relations between Islamabad and Kabul have collapsed amid surging militancy in Pakistan’s west, Pakistani officials have accused Afghans of involvement in terrorism and drug trafficking.
Iran expelled about 2mn Afghans in 2025, including hundreds of thousands in the two weeks after the Israel-Iran war amid accusations of espionage from Tehran. Iranian officials previously said Afghans were deported to reduce pressure on “state subsidies”.
Western nations are also sending Afghans back. European countries, which have lambasted the Taliban’s human rights record, deported dozens of Afghan nationals with criminal convictions last year.
After a former Afghan special forces operative shot dead a US National Guards woman in Washington in November, the US shut its resettlement programme, leaving tens of thousands of Afghans in Pakistan and Qatar with links to the US military at risk of deportation to Afghanistan.
Refugees from Pakistan often arrive at Omari camp, tucked between the rocky peaks at the end of the Khyber Pass, the route to Afghanistan.
The road through Omari once carried $2bn worth of informal and formal trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan. That trade is now shut. Today, the trucks carry families, their belongings accumulated over three generations in Pakistan, and heaps of bamboo for roofing and scaffolding.
Mullah Mohammad Hashim Maiwandwal, the Taliban official overseeing Omari camp, said the Taliban are working on a “land allocation scheme” to assist returnees acquire land for building homes and growing crops but says more international help is needed.
The Taliban’s ministry of refugees and repatriation said: “On one hand, prolonged wars have damaged the economic foundations here, and on the other hand, unfair international economic sanctions have largely blocked economic progress, which has put all Afghans in trouble.”
Abdul Ghafoor, a 50-year-old fruit vendor, was five when he and his family fled Soviet forces for Pakistan.
“I am very proud to be back in my home country,” he said, happy to escape harassment by Pakistani police. But he is terrified for his six daughters, four of whom will have to withdraw from school because of the Taliban’s restrictions on girls’ education. “My wife is collapsing from all of the stress,” he said.
In a village ringed by olive trees some 40km from the border, Parvana, a 21-year-old woman who, like many Afghans, has only one name, praised the Taliban for bringing peace and security.
That said, life in Afghanistan is expensive, she said. The cost of building materials has soared as more people arrive. Her family of three has just finished construction of their own one-bedroom home.
Parvana, employed as a brick worker in Pakistan but barred from most work in Afghanistan, said her husband’s income of 250 afghanis a day is barely enough to get by. “I want to work. If there is any chance, I will take it,” she said.
Women can work from home and in gender-segregated businesses, such as agriculture. Among the saffron vendors of Herat, in far west Afghanistan, women who lived in Iran fare best, said Ziauddin Haidari, chief executive of Kabul-based First Microfinance Bank.
Afghan women who grew up in Iran or Pakistan tend to be better educated than those who never left Afghanistan, he said. “They are more skilled at leveraging technology, online marketing and designing their packaging to appeal to markets outside of Afghanistan,” Haidari said. “The returnees bring knowledge that no one in some of the host communities has, which could be a big economic benefit for everyone,” he said.
Even men who are highly qualified can struggle to find work.
In Jalalabad’s Daman bazaar, Zakria Azizi, a computer scientist born and raised in Pakistan, makes his living selling chickens. The 24-year-old came to Afghanistan in September with his parents, who had migrated east when Soviet tanks rolled in in the early 1980s. They have no land, and very few connections in their country of citizenship. “I cannot find work,” Azizi said. “I am an engineer, but my degree is useless.”
One chilly afternoon, beneath the Spin Ghar mountains not far from the Pakistan border, 10-year-old Ali picked up a bat and stepped to the wicket — a stack of bricks. He learnt cricket in north-west Pakistan before deportation to Afghanistan a few months ago, Ali’s father Liaqat said.
Liaqat has struggled to find work, but he says he is not worried about his son’s future in Afghanistan. “Our national cricket team was founded in camps in Pakistan,” he said. “He can become one of them.”
Additional reporting by Jawad Kohnaward in Kabul
Data visualisation by Martin Stabe and cartography by Steven Bernard
Comments