ISLAMABAD: Hundreds of Pakistani pilgrims, students and workers have finally made it back home from Iran this week, telling stories of tense roads, sleepless nights and missiles flashing overhead as the conflict between Israel and Iran pushes the region to the brink of wider war.

A week of Israeli air and missile strikes against its major rival that started on June 13 has wiped out the top echelon of Iran’s military command, damaged its nuclear capabilities and killed hundreds of people, while Iranian retaliatory strikes have killed two dozen civilians in Israel.

In the immediate aftermath of Friday’s attacks, Iran closed its airspace to commercial traffic, leaving hundreds of expats, including Pakistani pilgrims, students and workers, stranded. 

For Hassan Raza, a 22-year-old student at Al-Mustafa International University in Qom, the abrupt closure of the skies turned an ordinary day into a marathon journey through the heart of a country on edge.

“When Israel attacked Iran on 13th June, I was at Tehran International Airport, and after a few moments, all flights were canceled and we entered Pakistan from the border of Rimdan by road,” Raza told Arab News on Wednesday in a telephone interview. 

Pakistan and Iran share a 909-kilometer (565-mile) border, which separates Balochistan from the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchestan. Forced to abandon plane tickets, many stranded Pakistanis like Raza pooled resources to travel by bus, heading south from Tehran toward the remote border at Rimdan.

The bus route took Raza and his group past Natanz, a name known worldwide for being the site of Iran’s main uranium enrichment facilities and one of the prime targets of repeated Israeli attacks since Friday.

“We passed by Natanz, which is a nuclear power plant in Iran and has been targeted multiple times by Israel,” Raza said. 

As they continued, they witnessed firsthand the flashes and arcs of missiles fired in retaliation.

“We saw that many missiles were launched from Iran toward Israel and made videos of this as well,” he said. “After 20 to 22 hours, we reached the Rimdan border crossing and entered Pakistan.”

Along the road journey, Raza added, despite the echo of distant missile exchanges, daily life seemed remarkably calm.

“JUST IN TIME”

Syed Nadeem Abbas Shirazi, a pilgrim from Mandi Bahauddin in Punjab province, had arrived in Mashhad, a sacred city for Shiite Muslims, to visit holy shrines when the attack threw the region into uncertainty.

“When Iran was attacked, I was in Mashhad. We went out and interacted with the local people, and they showed no signs of fear. In fact, they were very emotional,” Shirazi said.

“They were chanting slogans against Israel and the United States, and many said they had no fear of martyrdom, they desired it,” he added. 

As the situation remained tense, Shirazi and his group decided to return by road rather than wait for flights to resume.

“From Mashhad, we boarded a bus at 1pm and reached Chabahar at noon the next day,” he said. 

The group then hired a taxi for the final stretch to the Pakistan border near Gwadar.

For others, the trip home meant navigating jam-packed highways and rationed fuel in a country bracing for more strikes. 

Syed Ali Hassan, an electrician from Layyah who worked near Tehran, said he felt the atmosphere change instantly when the attacks began on Friday.

“People were not openly panicking, but you could feel the fear in the air, everyone seemed to be preparing for the worst,” Hassan said.

Amid the quiet fear, Hassan and a handful of other Pakistanis found a bus heading west toward the Taftan border in Pakistan’s Balochistan province.

“The journey wasn’t easy. Highways were packed with vehicles, fuel stations had long lines, and we traveled all night with brief stops, mostly in silence,” he said. 

Some passengers were worried about possible airstrikes or roadblocks, but the group managed to reach the border without incident.

At Taftan, exhausted and emotionally drained, many Pakistanis breathed a sigh of relief as they stepped back onto home ground.

“It felt like we had made it out just in time,” Hassan said. 

PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Pakistan says it has expelled more than a million Afghans in the past two years, yet many have quickly attempted to return — preferring to take their chances dodging the law than struggle for existence in a homeland some had never even seen before.

“Going back there would be sentencing my family to death,” said Hayatullah, a 46-year-old Afghan deported via the Torkham border crossing in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in early 2024.

Since April and a renewed deportation drive, some 200,000 Afghans have spilled over the two main border crossings from Pakistan, entering on trucks loaded with hastily packed belongings.

But they carry little hope of starting over in the impoverished country, where girls are banned from school after primary level.

Hayatullah, a pseudonym, returned to Pakistan a month after being deported, traveling around 800 kilometers (500 miles) south to the Chaman border crossing in Balochistan, because for him, life in Afghanistan “had come to a standstill.”

He paid a bribe to cross the Chaman frontier, “like all the day laborers who regularly travel across the border to work on the other side.”

His wife and three children — including daughters, aged 16 and 18, who would be denied education in Afghanistan — had managed to avoid arrest and deportation.

Hayatullah moved the family to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and a region mostly populated by Pashtuns — the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.

“Compared to Islamabad, the police here don’t harass us as much,” he said.

The only province governed by the opposition party of former Prime Minister Imran Khan — who is now in prison and in open conflict with the federal government — Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is considered a refuge of relative security for Afghans.

Samad Khan, a 38-year-old Afghan who also spoke using a pseudonym, also chose to relocate his family to Peshawar.

Born in eastern Pakistan’s Lahore city, he set foot in Afghanistan for the first time on April 22 — the day he was deported.

“We have no relatives in Afghanistan, and there’s no sign of life. There’s no work, no income, and the Taliban are extremely strict,” he said.

At first, he tried to find work in a country where 85 percent of the population lives on less than one dollar a day, but after a few weeks he instead found a way back to Pakistan.

“I paid 50,000 rupees (around $180) to an Afghan truck driver,” he said, using one of his Pakistani employees’ ID cards to cross the border.

He rushed back to Lahore to bundle his belongings and wife and two children — who had been left behind — into a vehicle, and moved to Peshawar.

“I started a second-hand shoe business with the support of a friend. The police here don’t harass us like they do in Lahore, and the overall environment is much better,” he told AFP.

It’s hard to say how many Afghans have returned, as data is scarce.

Government sources, eager to blame the country’s problems on supporters of Khan, claim that hundreds of thousands of Afghans are already back and settled in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — figures that cannot be independently verified.

Migrant rights defenders in Pakistan say they’ve heard of such returns, but insist the numbers are limited.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) told AFP that “some Afghans who were returned have subsequently chosen to remigrate to Pakistan.”

“When individuals return to areas with limited access to basic services and livelihood opportunities, reintegration can be challenging,” said Avand Azeez Agha, communications officer for the UN agency in Kabul.

They might move on again, he said, “as people seek sustainable opportunities.”