‘This is our home’: D-day for Afghans facing Pakistan deportation

Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan is the only home Mohammad Laal Khan has known. He was born here. He married here. His children were born here. He buried his eldest brother here.

But a late-night police raid in November last year shattered his sense of belonging.

Khan was born in South Waziristan, a tribal district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a few years after his parents fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Since the 1990s, the family — including Khan’s mother, four brothers, their families, and other relatives — has lived in the suburbs of Pakistan’s capital Islamabad in mud-plastered houses without electricity or other basic utilities.

Now he is on Pakistan’s list for deportation.

“It is as if being an Afghan is a curse upon our existence,” Khan, 36, told media on a recent March afternoon in the same room where dozens of police officers had stormed in, threatening to take away all the men.

Khan says, despite much pleading, four of his brothers were taken away and charged with living in the country “illegally”. Their ordeal ended after two weeks when a court granted them bail.

The entire family possesses Afghan Citizenship Cards (ACC), a government-sanctioned identification document issued to Afghan citizens living in Pakistan. But over the past two years, between September 2023 and February 2025, a systemic government crackdown on Afghan nationals has resulted in the expulsion of nearly 850,000 Afghans from Pakistan, including women and children.

Now, hundreds of thousands of ACC-holding Afghans like Khan, having spent almost their entire lives in Pakistan, face expulsion from April 1.

“We don’t know anything about Afghanistan. We have lived here all our lives, made friends here, built our businesses here. If the government insists on throwing us out, we will leave, but we will return once again,” Khan said.