INTERVIEW One Afghan refugee's fight to breathe and belong in Korea

Khadijeh, an Afghan refugee from Iran, stands on the campus of Jeonbuk National University in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province, July 9, where she is pursuing a master's degree in nursing. After more than three years of petitions and legal battles, she was granted refugee status by a Korean court in May. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk

By Park Han-sol

• Published Jul 25, 2025 3:21 PM KST
• Updated Jul 31, 2025 2:49 PM KST

JEONJU, North Jeolla Province — Everyone has that one song, a kind of comfort track and sonic shelter that steadies the heart when words fall short. For Khadijeh, it’s a ballad sung in a language she couldn’t speak or understand just five years ago: g.o.d.’s “Road.”

“The road I’m taking now, where does it lead me? Where will it take me? I don’t know. And yet, I’m still walking today.”

It wasn’t until months into her Korean language studies that the lyrics of the 24-year-old melody fully opened up to her. But when they did, they struck with quiet force.

“It felt as if the song was speaking the words I couldn’t say,” she told The Korea Times.

Each verse seemed to mirror the winding contours of her own journey — from the margins of Iranian society, where she grew up as an Afghan refugee, to the tree-lined campus of a Korean university, where she now walks as a nursing student. A life rebuilt, thousands of miles and a world away from where she began.

Childhood in shadows

Khadijeh, who asked to be identified only by her first name due to security concerns, was born in Iran to Afghan parents who had fled war decades earlier. One of her earliest memories offers a glimpse of what that meant.

She was 6, her small hand clasped tightly around her younger sister’s as they made their way through the crowded streets of Isfahan. Their path led to a relative’s home, tucked on the edge of the Iranian city.

Just as the familiar doorway came into sight, so did a few faces of older boys peering from the house next door, their eyes locked on the girls’ every step.

What happened next survives only in fragments: the slur “cockroach” spat in Farsi, and the cold, stinging shock of bleach water poured over their heads.

It was a moment that stayed with her, not just for its cruelty, but for how often it would echo throughout the years to come.

This wouldn’t be the last time she heard the words “cockroach” and “parasite” hurled at her. Nor would it be the last time she was reminded how few rights she held in the country she’d called home her entire life.

“I was born in Iran. I speak Farsi. I’ve lived there my whole life. But I could never be Iranian, not in a hundred years,” Khadijeh, now 32, said in Korean, seated in her small home in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province.

Growing up as the child of Afghan migrants meant being shut out of many basic entitlements. Her family couldn’t legally own property or register a car in their name. They were unable to open bank accounts. Where they could live, work and travel came with heavy restrictions. And no matter how long they remained in the country, they were not eligible for citizenship.

But if Iran was a country that denied her, Afghanistan — the land her parents had fled in the 1980s — felt even farther away. As members of the Hazara ethnic minority, her community has endured generations of mass killings and forced displacement since the late 19th century, atrocities that only intensified under Taliban rule.

Caught between a nation that cast her out and another she couldn’t return to, she grew up with the sense that education was something out of reach.

At 7, she was eager to start elementary school. Her older sisters had filled her imagination with stories of sitting at their own wooden desks, learning to read and write.

“I couldn’t picture what a school desk looked like,” she said. “Just hearing them talk about it made me desperate to go.”

But just as she was set to begin, the rules in her city changed: Afghan children were no longer allowed to enroll in local schools. One of her sisters, who had attended for three years before the ban, became Khadijeh’s first teacher and taught her the Persian alphabet at home.

“I was happy just to learn anything,” she recalled. “But I also couldn’t stop wondering what it would be like to sit at a real desk.”

Her drive to learn only grew stronger. Encouraged by her father, who urged all eight of his children to seek education however they could, she eventually passed the entrance exams for middle and high schools that accepted Afghan students. She went on to rank first in her class.

When it came time for college, yet another door slammed shut.

In theory, Afghan refugees could gain admission to Iranian universities. In practice, the barriers were steep. Classified as foreign nationals, they faced far higher tuition fees and fiercer competition for a limited number of seats.

The biggest hurdle was a convoluted bureaucracy: Even those born and raised in Iran were required to travel alone to Afghanistan — a politically volatile country they had never set foot in — just to apply for a student visa at an Iranian Embassy there. Then came weeks of waiting in uncertainty.

Khadijeh had long dreamed of studying medicine and becoming a doctor, but the cost was beyond reach. Instead, she enrolled in a midwifery program — a field she hoped would still lead to a meaningful career.

After graduating, she was denied a license to practice because of her Afghan nationality.

“They wouldn’t issue me a certificate, so I couldn’t work,” she said. “That was the first time I ever regretted studying. I couldn’t work in Iran. I couldn’t return to Afghanistan. What was the point of all those years?”

Finding new home in Korea

It was then that a radical idea began to take root: to build a future from scratch, somewhere entirely unfamiliar, yet full of possibility.

At a friend’s suggestion, Korea emerged on her horizon.

She had first glimpsed it through escapist TV dramas like “Boys Over Flowers,” where girls spoke and lived freely. What began as a vague dream travel destination gradually grew into something more concrete — a country that recognized the value of education and women’s rights.

In December 2020, Khadijeh stepped on Korean soil for the first time, ready to start her studies at Jeonbuk National University in Jeonju for a Korean language program.

Then, just half a year into her new life, as she sat in a classroom far from home, her phone lit up with news that sent a shock wave through her world: The Taliban had retaken Afghanistan.

Her mind immediately raced to one of her sisters, who had settled in Kabul with three young children for work. She also feared for the family she had left behind in Iran. The stress turned her hair white. Her grades in language classes plummeted. With limited Korean skills, she had no one to confide in and was forced to bear the burden alone.

“I used to go to class every day, but I just wanted to give up. I kept asking myself, why am I even here? I can’t help my sister. I can’t comfort my parents who are worried sick,” she recalled.

The Taliban’s resurgence also posed a threat to Khadijeh herself. Iran’s stringent travel restrictions on Afghan refugees meant that she couldn’t reenter the country freely after leaving. To see her family again, she would need a short-term visa — one that could only be obtained by first entering Afghanistan and applying at the Iranian Embassy there, as she had done years earlier for her college student visa.

But willingly stepping into Taliban-ruled territory was a risk she couldn’t afford to take.

What made her return possibly more perilous was that, during her time in Korea, Khadijeh had agreed to appear in a local documentary, where she spoke under her real name, her face uncovered, her words a clear rebuke of the Taliban’s repression of women.

“What I didn’t know was that a Taliban official was also featured in the same film,” she said. “I wasn’t even wearing a hijab. My face was fully shown. I kept thinking — what if they see it?”

With no country left to return to, Khadijeh applied for asylum at the Gwangju branch of the Korea Immigration Service in February 2022.

Four months later, her request was denied.

Officials ruled that she did not meet the core requirement for refugee protection — a “well-founded fear of persecution” — and concluded she could safely return to Afghanistan or Iran. In 2024, Korea’s refugee acceptance rate stood at just 1.75 percent, the second-lowest among G20 nations.

Her heart sank.

“I couldn’t understand it,” she said. “If Afghanistan were truly safe, then why is the Korean Embassy to Afghanistan based in Qatar, not Kabul?”

With support from the nonprofit legal group Advocates for Public Interest Law (APIL), she filed a lawsuit, hoping to overturn the ruling.

For three grueling years of petitions and legal battles, she waited.

This May, the Gwangju District Court ruled in her favor. The verdict recognized that the Taliban’s return had signaled indiscriminate violence, particularly against ethnic minorities like the Hazara, and that the Taliban, far from offering protection, was itself the chief source of persecution. The court also acknowledged what Khadijeh had long known: there was no path back to Iran, either.

She broke into tears when the ruling came down.

“My lawyer texted me the result, but I hadn’t slept and was too overwhelmed to even understand the message. I had to use a translator app. And when I finally grasped it, I just cried and cried. I could finally breathe,” she said.

“When refugees cry, even tears of joy carry the weight of every hardship that came before.”

Now, at Jeonbuk National University, Khadijeh is taking her first steps toward a long-postponed dream in health care — this time, as a nursing student.

“Working in a hospital has always been my dream,” she said. “But that hope was crushed again and again back in Iran. Now, it feels like I’m reclaiming a part of myself.”

Still fighting

Though Khadijeh is grateful for the freedom she has found, joy remains a fragile thing. Her ailing parents, younger sister and eldest brother’s family are still in Iran.

“Just when I thought I could finally breathe after receiving good news in Korea, the war between Iran and Israel broke out,” she said with a weary sigh. “It seems like there’s never a moment of real peace — not when you’re a refugee.”

Since the conflict began in June, Afghan migrants in Iran have been accused, without evidence, of spying and carrying out terrorist acts on behalf of Israel and the United States.

More than half a million have been expelled in the ensuing crackdown, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Security forces have rounded up individuals — both documented and undocumented — and dumped them in sweltering border camps already overpopulated, where food and drinking water are scarce.

Khadijeh has urged her parents and sister to stay inside at all times. She still has no word on her brother’s family.

For her, the hardest part isn’t just watching from afar; it’s the helplessness, the gnawing sense that she and her loved ones have always lived at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

“I just hope they can get out of Iran before they’re forced back into Afghanistan,” she noted.

“No one becomes a refugee by choice. What happened to us — it could happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time.”