Days of Lead in Sefid Sang: Two Generations, One Camp, One Fate

Amid the intensifying wave of Afghan deportations from Iran, thousands are being detained daily by agents of the Islamic Republic and held in camps along the border. One of the most well-known of these is the Sefid Sang camp in Fariman County, Razavi Khorasan Province—a place where Afghan migrants are detained in groups and deported.

This narrative brings together the experience of Soheila, an Afghan girl recently held in the camp, with the journal entries of Younes Heydari from 1999—two stories from the same place, separated by over two decades.

It was late spring. The sun was rising behind mountains whose names I didn’t know. I thought to myself, This is it. This is the end. We still didn’t dare pull back the curtains of the bus—tightly fastened with wires at the top and bottom—to look outside. But you could peek with one eye from the corner. We were in a city. Where? We didn’t know. The night before, we’d passed Mashhad, and no one knew where we were after that.

The plains ended, and a city appeared. Long walls came into view. The bus, carrying fifty passengers, entered. One road, two boulevards. The gates opened—no air came in. A soldier appeared and stood by the entrance.

"Line up one by one and follow me."

They seated us along the boulevard. A long line of fifty. Three men started counting to make sure the numbers added up.

"Collect the phones. Hurry up—everyone, hand over your phones."

I was frightened. I looked at my father. He reached into his pocket and handed over his phone. My mother, sister, and I did the same.

Someone asked, “Even basic phones?”

“Yes, now move!”

An old man stood and approached the soldier.

“Sir, my household items are in Taybad. My son is waiting for us to arrive so he can bring them. I have to call him...”

The officer shouted:

“Did I give you permission to get up?”

“I was just saying...”

“Shut up! Speak again, and I’ll keep your family here. Now hand over the phone!”

They lined us up and led us into a large square.

I remembered how, back in Herat, I always wanted to go to a stadium to watch a football match. This place felt like a stadium—except for the dirt square in the middle and the sorrowful faces.

My father whispered, “This is the Sefid Sang camp.”

Like ducklings, heads bowed and slightly hunched to the left, we followed the officer. Fifty sorrowful ducklings.

A small canopy stood in a corner of the camp. Groups of people sat beneath it. A soldier seated us under the shade. A man held a loudspeaker, yelling into it:

“Collect 400 tomans per person if you want your group to move. If even one person doesn’t pay, the whole group stays. Listen! I don’t have any buses today. Whoever gathers the money first gets to go. 400 tomans each—travellers’ cheques only!”

My father grabbed a notebook and pen, collected the money in ten minutes, and handed it over.

A boy, around 26, approached us. He wore dusty black trousers and a faded yellow T-shirt with a bold bird spreading its wings, ready to fly.

He approached my father:

“Please tell your group to give me some money too.”

Without hesitation, my father gave him some.

Someone from our group asked, “How long have you been here?”

“Seventeen days. I was working on a construction site when they stormed in and took me. Seventeen days I’ve been here. I’m stuck because of the bus fare. At noon, they make us do duck walks under the burning sun.”

His voice choked with grief. Shoulders slumped, he walked away.

My father called me over. He pointed to a corner of the camp.

“It was the 1990s. They caught me in the dead of winter, on my way from work. I spent 71 days in this same camp—Sefid Sang. That spot over there, that was my tent. Two of us shared it. Snow boots on the ground, and we were still in our work clothes. We didn’t have money for transport. And it wasn’t just me. The whole camp was filled with tents...”

I looked at the empty field and imagined the tents. It reminded me of the Native Americans and their encampments.

My father said,

“It was a terrible year. You think this hollow sound in my chest is from now? It’s from those seventy snowy days in Sefid Sang. My lungs got infected here and never healed.”

After Afghanistan’s civil war and the Taliban’s rise to power in the 1990s, a massive wave of Afghan migrants fled to Iran in search of safety, work, and a better life. However, by the late 1990s, Iran’s policies shifted. Thousands of Afghans—many of whom had lived and worked in Iran for years—were subjected to mass detentions. Without summons or legal orders, agents detained migrants at their workplaces, on the streets, or even in their homes, and sent them to deportation camps like Sefid Sang.

One of the most well-documented historical accounts of Sefid Sang is the book Days of Lead by Younes Heydari—writer, translator, and university professor. In 1999, after being arrested by authorities in Iran, Heydari was taken to Sefid Sang. While quarantined inside the camp, he documented his daily experiences and reflections—first scribbled on cigarette packets, then in a 40-page notebook.

Days of Lead was published in 2024 by the Taslimi Foundation in California. It remains one of the few written records of the deportation camps where Afghan migrants were held in Iran.

In his book, Heydari describes the arrival of detainees in sealed buses, the electric gates of the camp surrounded by armed guards and watchtowers. Upon arrival, their heads were shaved with dull scissors, and they were forced to pay excessive fees—even those arrested straight from job sites with no money on them. Some had to beg or borrow from fellow detainees just to comply.

Heydari paints a grim picture of the quarantine section: a massive hall, 36 meters long and 12 wide, with high walls and a metal roof—no ventilation, almost no natural light. At one end, only four toilets—two of which were functional. A low-pressure faucet with a narrow pipe was the only source of water for hundreds, used for drinking, washing, and ablutions.

With painful precision, he captures how detainees suffered from illness, hunger, and humiliation. Under the pretext of headcounts, guards lashed them into line, insulted and kicked them, forbade any complaint. There was no access to basic hygiene. Those with some money could buy soap or shampoo. The poorer ones washed with plain water. Those whose backs bore whip marks couldn’t even bear to touch their skin. They would rinse off, put their wet clothes back on, and sit in the cold, waiting for them to dry.

In the camp’s second section, Heydari describes 120 cement shelters with no doors or windows—just dome-shaped roofs and a one-meter opening as an entrance. At the time, the camp held 2,205 detainees, far beyond its official capacity of 1,800. At least 400 people lived outdoors, under the scorching sun or on cement platforms, without any shade or shelter.

He also mentions a rule: those who wanted to be deported faster had to perform seven days of unpaid labor around the camp. In exchange, they received three extra pieces of bread per day and were placed in the first group for deportation.

Heydari writes that many migrants remained in the camp for months, without knowing what would happen to them. Departures had stopped, but arrivals continued. Each day brought new faces—dusty clothes, tired bodies—adding to the mass of forgotten detainees.

At the time of publishing Days of Lead, Heydari wrote:

“What matters is that these images of suffering endure for future generations—so they know what we went through. A generation with no homeland. And still, we have none.”

Yet, more than two decades later, the same fate has repeated itself. In 2025, following military tensions between Iran and Israel, the Islamic Republic detained and deported hundreds of thousands of Afghan migrants—often without documents or clear charges, labeling them “spies” or “foreign collaborators.”

Border camps like Sefid Sang—etched in collective memory as symbols of homelessness, humiliation, and violence—filled once again.

Now they hold children pulled out of school, mothers nursing babies in the heat, and fathers trying to get their families across the border with empty hands.

In just the first half of 2025, over 1.4 million people returned to Afghanistan from neighboring countries, most forcibly expelled from Iran.

The United Nations has warned that these mass deportations—carried out without guarantees of safety, dignity, or humanitarian support—pose the risk of a large-scale humanitarian crisis.