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. 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.
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. 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?
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