RASC News Agency: As Iranian authorities prepare to intensify the mass expulsion of Afghanistani refugees beginning September 15, the Taliban’s so-called Department of Statistics and Information has announced the dispatch of a five-member delegation to Tehran. The group claims it will “verify the identities” of Afghanistani migrants and address long-standing documentation issues an initiative widely viewed as political theatre rather than a serious attempt to defend displaced citizens. In a statement released Thursday, September 4, the Taliban said the delegation is led by Mohammad Nabi Nusrat, deputy head of the regime’s Civil Registration Department. The team has been tasked with devising “solutions to improve refugee registration” in Iran and assessing “operational needs” of Taliban staff based there. Yet observers note that such technical missions do little to shield migrants from imminent detention and forced return.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Ministry of Interior has confirmed that following September 15, police and security forces across Tehran and provincial cities will escalate crackdowns on Afghanistani refugees. Families are already being rounded up in daily sweeps, bused to detention centers, and forcibly deported across the border. By year’s end, Iran has pledged to expel at least three million Afghanistani nationals. The brunt of this policy falls on the second and third generations of Afghanistani migrants children and young adults born in Iran, who have never seen Afghanistan. They lack Afghanistani identity documents, are denied Iranian citizenship, and now face statelessness. “We are treated like criminals here, and when we look at our homeland, all we see is more repression under Taliban rule,” one refugee in Qom told RASC News, requesting anonymity for security reasons.
Humanitarian organizations warn that the expulsions will intensify an already dire crisis. Families returned to Afghanistan are met with drought, food insecurity, unemployment, and the Taliban’s suffocating restrictions on civil life. Women and children, stripped of education and work opportunities, are expected to suffer most. Aid agencies caution that forced returns risk overwhelming already fragile humanitarian networks. Despite the catastrophic implications, the Taliban’s response remains lethargic and symbolic. Analysts argue that the delegation to Tehran is not about protecting refugees but about cultivating political legitimacy with Iran. “The Taliban see refugees not as citizens to defend but as bargaining chips,” said political observer Rahmatullah Sadiqi (pseudonym). “Their silence on mass deportations is a clear signal that human lives rank far below their hunger for regional recognition.”
This is not the first time the Taliban have hidden behind religious rhetoric or shallow gestures to mask their failures. Just as the group blames poverty and natural disasters on “divine tests” to absolve itself of responsibility, it now treats the refugee crisis as a peripheral issue. The reality, however, is unavoidable: millions of Afghanistani families abroad face erasure, while those forced back home encounter a regime incapable or unwilling to provide the most basic support. In the end, Afghanistani refugees remain caught between Tehran’s iron-fisted migration policies and the Taliban’s indifference. Abandoned abroad, unwelcome at home, and ignored by their rulers, they embody one of the gravest humanitarian tragedies of the region a crisis in which the Taliban’s failures of governance and diplomacy stand starkly exposed.
