The elderly grimace, hobbling on crutches, and wide-eyed children stare, cradling chickens carried from homes they were forced to leave behind.
“It feels good to be in my own country,” 35-year-old Nazia says, just minutes after she crosses from Pakistan, where she was born, into Afghanistan.
The Torkham crossing, known as “Zero Point”, is where one hard life ends and another begins.
“But I’ve never been to Afghanistan before and many people here don’t even have enough bread to eat,” Nazia sighs as she heads, two of her children in tow, toward registration counters festooned with white and black Taliban flags.
They are part of the biggest cross-border movement of people anywhere in the world.
Millions of Afghans have fled across the borders to Pakistan and Iran for decades – seeking refuge or employment – and the number escaping Afghanistan has continued to rise since the Taliban takeover in August 2021.
Most are now being forced to return as these two neighbours crack down on undocumented migrants. Nazia and her family were undocumented but the UN and human rights groups say the security sweep is reaching far beyond that group to include registered Afghans too. Even Pakistan now publicly says that Afghans with Proof of Registration cards are not exempt.
The expulsions show no sign of stopping.
AFPThe number forced to return this year from Pakistan and Iran has already reached another million, according to the UN’s Refugee Agency, the UNHCR.
“In a little under three years, we’ve seen six million people, a population that is itself the size of a small country, come back to Afghanistan,” observes Charlie Goodlake, spokesperson for the UNHCR in Afghanistan.
“We’ve never seen in recent history a return movement on this scale,” he underlines, standing in the baking heat in the tented village close to the border.
It’s a desolate landscape of tarpaulin and plastic shelters, many now tattered and torn, erected by the UN and other aid agencies to provide refuge for a few nights for a people arriving with nowhere to go.
Many returnees have not set foot in Afghanistan for decades; many like Nazia have never been here at all.
“I left 45 years ago during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and most of my brothers were born in Pakistan,” explains Sarwar, who arrived a few days earlier with seven brothers and their families in a convoy of 40 people and the jumble of their worldly goods packed into a lumbering Pakistani lorry.
“We spent a long time there, so of course I felt heartbroken when they forced us out of our home,” he says.
“But, despite all that pain, I am also happy because I am finally free of harassment by Pakistan’s police.”
AFP via Getty ImagesEvery family we met told us they had experienced prejudice and harassment by authorities in Pakistan.
The Pakistan government has not responded to the BBC’s questions, but a foreign ministry spokesman told a briefing in Islamabad on Sunday that “the Government of Pakistan undertakes the necessary measures to prevent any instance of harassment or maltreatment of Afghan nationals in Pakistan. If such incidents have taken place, they are sporadic and are dealt with fully in accordance with the law”.
Both Pakistan and Iran say it’s past time for Afghans to go home, accusing some of posing a security risk, and others of being a financial burden.
The expulsions from Pakistan and alleged abuse intensified after a major escalation in fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan last October. In February, Human Rights Watch highlighted “door-to-door raids, late-night home searches and arrests without warrants”.
In Iran, which claimed last year to host more than four million undocumented Afghans, the mass deportations were accelerated after its 12-day war with Israel and the US in June 2025.
The New York based Centre for Human Rights in Iran accused the authorities of using the post-war climate to “cast suspicion on Afghan migrants – accusing them of espionage and branding them as potential spies for Israel”.
The UN’s refugee agency continues to underscore the humanitarian principle that any return should be “voluntary, safe and dignified”.
But in Torkham, Sarwar’s sister-in-law Zarina laments the precarious future they face: “We have no resources to start a business or earn a living, and we don’t even own a tent to live in”.
Inside the barren transit tent, which provides little escape from scorching 41C heat, Zarina sits alongside an anxious huddle of women and their children.
Are they worried about the future for women and girls in a country where the Taliban has barred women from much of public life, including secondary school and university?
Forty-year-old Zarina turns to make a sweeping gesture with her arm: “Look at them, they’re all girls. Of course I’m worried.”
Some returnees are not just worried; they’re terrified.
“I don’t leave this house,” a former Afghan security guard, first deported from Iran and then Pakistan, nervously tells us when we meet him far from the border in what he hopes is a safe house.
“We are all living in fear including my wife and children who are also afraid to go outside.”
He dismisses the Taliban government’s amnesty, announced days after their return to power which declared that former government officials, security personnel and civil servants would not face retaliation and were encouraged to return to work.
“I have no trust in their amnesty because many of my colleagues have been killed.” He says his case had been registered with the UN but was deported before he could be transferred to a safer country.
Financial hardship magnifies the pain. The steep cuts in foreign aid worldwide are especially sharp in Afghanistan where the Taliban are still stuck in sanctions linked to terrorism and human rights.
Pakistan confirmed on Sunday that 16,000 vulnerable Afghans have now been granted, on humanitarian grounds, a temporary exemption from being deported – a decision welcomed by the UN.
But sources estimate that the number of Afghans in Pakistan at risk of serious harm, including women and girls who would be denied education, could be as high as 250,000.
At the graceful foreign ministry compound in Kabul, Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi tries to put on a brave face.
“There’s no doubt that we need some help,” he admits. “There is pressure due to their return but in the long run, it will benefit them as well as Afghanistan.”
In the first years after the Taliban swept to power in 2021, some of their ministers made light of humanitarian issues, saying God would provide.
The UN now estimates that 21.9 million people, nearly half the country, need assistance this year to survive. The UN’s children agency, UNICEF, said last week that one million children faced “life-threatening” malnutrition.
“No country in the world could handle this kind of crisis on its own,” UNHCR spokesperson Goodlake assesses, while acknowledging Taliban government efforts to help returnees as they arrive.
But, he adds, “We also know that many of the restrictions and edicts they put in place, particularly on women and girls, don’t help us elicit international support”.
Muttaqi reiterates his government’s line that matters like girl’s education are “internal issues” for Afghans to resolve.
The severe restrictions on the lives of girls and women is one of the major issues in the Taliban’s international relationships and that has cost them. Five years on, only one country, Russia, has formally recognised their rule.
But when asked about this, Muttaqi points to the deepening diplomatic and economic ties with neighbours such as China and India, as well as Central Asian states.
As for Kabul’s relative isolation from western nations, he asks, “those who didn’t have relationships with us over the past five years, what have they achieved?”
He answers his own question: “Nothing.”
We heard that word – “nothing” – from every family we met at Zero Point, but in a much different sense.
All were embarking on the hardest of homecomings, beginning all over again – with almost nothing.
