Islamabad, Pakistan – Alishba*, a medical student, was on a maternity ward night shift in Lahore when her phone began filling with messages on September 8. “Someone said, ‘We’ve received a notification that almost 20 students are being expelled,’” she told Al Jazeera, her name changed to protect her identity. “My first reaction was, this is nonsense. How could a government expel students from universities without any reason?” By morning, it was not nonsense. She was one of nearly two dozen Afghan nationals named on her college’s expulsion list, circulating on Facebook within hours, all given less than three days to prepare to leave the only country where, as a woman, she has been able to study medicine at all. On September 1, the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC), the country’s medical regulator, ordered universities and colleges to send enrolled Afghan students home.
They were also barred from any new admissions, transfers or migrations of Afghan nationals for the current academic year. In all, more than 200 Afghan students are currently enrolled in Pakistani medical or dental colleges, according to the PMDC, and most of them have been hit. “I want to cry every minute,” Alishba said. “We are not dolls for them to play with. This is our life.” In a statement, the PMDC justified its directive, arguing that all foreign students enrolled in Pakistani medical or dental institutions needed to be registered with the regulator. It said “only 22 are presently registered” with the PMDC – including 14 who have graduated, and eight who are about to graduate.
But many of the other students came through the Allama Iqbal Scholarship, a programme run by Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission (HEC) with the Pakistani embassy in Kabul for top-scoring Afghan students. And the students say neither any Pakistani government agency nor their colleges told them at the time that they also needed to register with the PMDC, a body that — per its official mandate — both oversees medical practitioners and is supposed to register medical and dental students. “I came to Pakistan in 2021,” Alishba said. “They [Pakistan] provided us the scholarship, processed entirely through HEC and the embassy.” Nevertheless, within days of the PMDC directive, institutions across different parts of the country began issuing eviction notices, in some cases giving students as little as 24 hours to clear their hostel rooms. The order comes amid a broader, years-long expulsion drive that has coincided with a dramatic plunge in relations between Islamabad and the Taliban government in Kabul, marked by a rise in cross-border attacks and clashes along the two countries’ shared border. Pakistan launched what it called the Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan in late 2023, initially targeting undocumented migrants, after authorities said Afghan nationals had carried out 14 of 24 suicide bombings recorded in the country that year.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in June this year that more than 2.4 million Afghan nationals had returned since the drive began, describing it, in a message marking World Refugee Day, as a “phased, orderly and dignified repatriation process”. But to the medical and dental students now being forced to leave their studies midway, there’s nothing orderly or dignified about the way they are being treated. For Zainab*, a final-year student at another Lahore medical college, the order is the second time a change of government has closed a medical school door to her. She had completed one semester at Kabul University of Medical Sciences when the Taliban seized power in August 2021, ending her studies there, as part of the group’s broader ban on women in higher education.
She later won her place in Pakistan through the HEC scholarship. In her second year in Lahore, Zainab said, she walked into her college’s student affairs office and asked a simple question: Was she registered with PMDC? She was told not to worry about it, that registration would come later, after graduation. Three years on, that unanswered question has become the official justification for sending her home mid-degree. “If PMDC registration was genuinely the issue here, why wasn’t that stated anywhere?” she asked. “Why weren’t we told we weren’t registered?
Why wasn’t it raised on the very first day we arrived, if it mattered this much?” She initially held out hope the notice would not apply to her. “But then our own university issued the same notice, and our vice chancellor called us in and told us clearly: This is a PMDC order, there is nothing we can do, come and collect your NOCs,” she said, referring to the no-objection certificates required to leave. She has not formally been handed one. But she has been barred from lectures and hospital shifts since the notice arrived, which she says amounts to expulsion in practice, if not yet on paper. Students interviewed by Al Jazeera describe a registration process they say was never in their own hands.
Rizwan*, a final-year medical student in Rawalpindi, said universities, not students, submit registration data to PMDC, typically once a student reaches second or third year. “We are registered with the university, UHS and HEC,” he said, referring to the University of Health Sciences Lahore, which oversees several affected colleges. “But we are not registered with PMDC. Our registration is pending due to PMDC not approving it.” Rizwan said the gap traces back to a regulatory upheaval that predates the current dispute. Pakistan’s medical regulator was dissolved in 2019 under a presidential ordinance and replaced by a newly created body called the Pakistan Medical Commission (PMC). In 2022, the Islamabad High Court restored the PMDC and declared the PMC’s formation illegal, a reversal that left a backlog of students and graduates from that period without a clear registration status.
PMDC has since worked through the backlog in phases for various categories of students. Afghan students admitted during the transition, Rizwan said, were among those still waiting. The PMDC’s directive bars institutions from facilitating any transfer or migration for Afghan students, a clause he says would strip him of even the option of continuing elsewhere. “What if we want to continue somewhere else?” Rizwan, who is five months from finishing his degree, asked. Students interviewed by Al Jazeera were emphatic that they had never intended to remain in Pakistan beyond their studies, and had no legal path to do so regardless. “After graduation we are not given a visa, because our visa is extended on our student status,” Rizwan said. “When that status ends, we always go back.
We can’t stay here without a visa.” Zainab made a similar point more pointedly, rejecting any comparison with the undocumented migrants targeted by Pakistan’s wider repatriation drive. “We are not immigrants,” she said. “We were legally invited here, legally granted a scholarship by this country, legally issued a visa every single year. This should not be happening to us.” The picture is not uniform across the country. Batool*, a final-year medical student in Peshawar, said her college had not issued an eviction notice so far. She said her Pakistani classmates had been unfailingly supportive. “The culture, the language, even the food, feels remarkably close to home,” she said. “I’ve never experienced or heard anything negative from people here, not now, and not before any of this.” Afghanistan’s Taliban government has called the decision “inhumane”.
Chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the country’s Ministry of Higher Education stood ready to help returning students continue their studies. Rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW), too, condemned the government’s decision. “The Pakistan government’s order is shockingly short-sighted and cruel, and seems yet again aimed only at punishing Afghans because of Pakistan’s conflict with the Taliban,” Patricia Gossman, HRW’s senior associate Asia director, told Al Jazeera. “The end result of this incredibly callous approach is to deprive Afghans of trained doctors and other medical professionals, especially women, just as the country is in the throes of a humanitarian crisis,” she added. Two former Pakistani ambassadors to Afghanistan have also questioned the decision, urging the government to reverse it. Mansoor Ahmad Khan urged PMDC to “reconsider its decision on Afghan students in medical colleges and universities on humanitarian grounds”, proposing students be allowed to finish their degrees before any return is arranged.
Asif Durrani, a former special representative for Afghanistan, called the expulsion “shocking”. “Expelling these students, particularly young women who have fought against extraordinary odds simply to study, is not just an administrative matter,” Durrani wrote on X. “It is a question of humanity, compassion and Pakistan’s own moral responsibility. Let them study. Let them become doctors. Let them serve their people.
Reverse the decision. Give these students a future.” Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Sajjad Haider Khan told Al Jazeera that students holding a valid visa and registered in a degree programme “are supposed to stay in the country” and finish their studies. But he did not explain the gap between that assurance and what students describe happening on campuses. Khan also outlined this position in response to a question from a reporter at a weekly briefing on Thursday.
HEC did not respond to questions from Al Jazeera. PMDC also did not address questions, referring Al Jazeera instead to its public statement. Siddiq Shariati, president of the Afghan Student Union at the International Islamic University Islamabad, said the policy risked damage beyond the students immediately affected, and that he feared for his own position too, despite studying international relations rather than medicine. “Given that PMDC has already issued a notice for all medical students, it’s entirely possible HEC could issue a similar notification next, one that applies to all Afghan students across all disciplines,” he told Al Jazeera. “If that happens, we would be forced to leave as well.” In all, about 7,000 Afghan students are studying in Pakistani colleges, with more than 4,500 of them on Pakistan government-sponsored scholarships. Batool, the student in Peshawar, said the consequences of any expulsion would not fall equally on male and female students.
Male students, she said, could still be admitted to universities inside Afghanistan. “Female students are in a genuinely devastating position, because no one is going to open universities just to accommodate 200 or 300 girls trying to finish a degree,” she said. “And if they did make that exception, they’d be forced to open education more broadly to everyone, not just us, not just medicine, because the double standard would draw immediate criticism, both from inside and outside Afghanistan.” At Alishba’s college in Lahore, the vice chancellor gave students 24 hours to vacate the hostel, warning that anyone who stayed would be reported to the authorities. She has not yet been forced out, but has not been allowed back into class either. “The administration has said no Afghan student is permitted in class, and our attendance won’t be counted since we’re considered expelled,” she said. She has packed an “emergency” bag, just documents and a change of clothes, in case she is made to leave without warning. “My mother always dreamed of seeing me in scrubs, serving female patients who have no doctors in Afghanistan,” she said. “She has already made my graduation dress. Now, all of that has faded.
There is no graduation. There is no degree. “I feel like a doll being played with between the political issues of two countries,” Alishba added. “I’ve done nothing wrong. If you brought us here and gave us seats, let us finish our degrees.” *Names have been changed to protect the identities of the students.
