Lindisfarne Analysis September 2026

Last month the Lindisfarne Centre published what is probably the most detailed report produced by any organisation so far on life for Afghan Christians under the Taliban. This 125pp report clearly demonstrated that Afghan Christians caught by the Taliban were routinely being subjected to crimes against humanity, including multiple forms of torture and in some instances execution.

However, there is an equally chilling parallel story which is just beginning to hit the news headlines in the west. This is that the Pakistan government is currently in the midst of deporting possibly the entire population of Afghan refugees in the country – which at the start of the year numbered 2.1 million – back to Taliban controlled Afghanistan.

In fact, as far back as February 2024 the Lindisfarne Centre reported how the Pakistan government was seeking to deport up to a million Afghans back to Afghanistan.  However, what has happened now is that Pakistan appears to be intent on rapidly deporting its entire Afghan refugee population back to Taliban controlled Afghanistan. That unquestionably presents a grave risk to life for hundreds and potentially thousands of Afghan Christians.

Since the 1979 Soviet invasion Pakistan has hosted large numbers of Afghan refugees – and among them the Afghan church has grown, sometimes dramatically. Other Afghan Christians fled to Pakistan when the Taliban seized power in August 2021. For them Pakistan was the only neighbouring country with a visible and legally recognised Christian minority.

In 2023 both Iran and Pakistan began ‘persuading’ large numbers of Afghan refugees to return to Afghanistan and forcibly deporting others. This was a move that has proved popular among Pakistani citizens as the country faced major economic crises and after four decades of hosting Afghan refugees is suffering ‘compassion fatigue’.

Those ‘persuasion’ tactics, which can include Pakistani police arresting and interrogating Afghans, leave Afghan Christians particularly vulnerable as even Pakistani Christians do not trust the predominantly Muslim police to treat them fairly.

Pakistan’s returns policy began in September 2023 and followed a similar policy adopted by neighbouring Iran a few months earlier. However, at the beginning of this year the Pakistan government ramped up its refugee ‘removals’ significantly, possibly in response to the US governments 2025 freeze on aid which had contributed 42% of Pakistan’s refugee costs.

According to the UNHCR 686,200 Afghans have already been returned to Afghanistan so far this year - around a third of all Afghans in Pakistan, with 63,800 being forcibly deported. This alone would suggest the numbers of Afghan Christians sent back to Afghanistan are likely to be in the hundreds.

However, an even more serious escalation in the risk to Afghan Christians occurred in February this year when the Pakistan government announced it would repatriate back to Afghanistan 19,973 Afghans awaiting resettlement in the USA. These were among up to 100,000 Afghans currently in Pakistan who had already been recognised by western  governments as being particularly at risk of being killed by the Taliban.  For example, because they had worked with western military or were Christians – or in some cases both.

In July the UNHCR reported that the Pakistan government was using increasingly high pressure tactics to ‘persuade’ all Afghans, including those who had fled the Taliban to return to Afghanistan:

“In Pakistan, enforcement against Afghan nationals without valid visas intensified from 10 July following a Government directive to accelerate implementation of the existing ‘Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan’ (IFRP). Arrests, detention, raids and deportations were reported while landlord pressure and evictions added to uncertainty among Afghan communities. Fear of these measures remained a key factor influencing decisions to leave.”

So, what does this means for Afghan Christians?

Those repatriated to Afghanistan join around 3 million other Afghans forced to return from either Iran or Pakistan since 2023. Not only are they arriving in a country suffering famine, but for many Afghan Christians who were born in Pakistan, it is a country and to some extent a culture that they have never before known. It is also of course, an authoritarian Islamist regime.

To add to these pressures, the Pakistani and Iranian authorities appear to be sharing lists of deportees with the Taliban. While Taliban intelligence in turn are checking new arrivals against the lists of dissidents that as our recent report demonstrated they have been building up for some time.

The latest increase in what are effectively expulsions from Pakistan means that it is now likely that a reasonable estimate of the number of Afghan Christians being forced to return to Afghanistan, could potentially exceed a thousand.

As the Lindisfarne Centre’s recent report demonstrated, Afghan Christians discovered by the Taliban are already being subjected to widespread crimes against humanity – and are potentially at risk of genocide.

Please pray for Afghan Christians – both in Pakistan and Afghanistan