Islamabad, Pakistan – On a recent October evening, 41-year-old Shakira Aslami was washing dishes in the tiny kitchen of her two-room apartment when she heard a commotion outside.

As she opened the door, her son rushed in. “They are here, the police are here,” Milad told his mother in a panic.

Shakira knew what she had to do: she searched the apartment for the bag that contained her family’s most prized possessions – their passports and visa papers – while her daughter, Lima, kept watch from the stairwell as three police officers made their way through the building.

“I could see from the stairs of our fourth-floor apartment, three men were on the first floor, shouting and yelling,” Lima recalled.

Shakira found the bag – a blue backpack that Lima used to take to school with her back in Afghanistan – and frantically pulled out the papers, just as the men began banging on her door.

She presented the passports and documents to the police officers – two of whom were in plain clothes and the other in uniform and carrying a gun. One of them, she said, “shouted that I cannot live here and tried to snatch the papers from me, threatening to arrest me”.

Her neighbours – almost all of them refugees like Shakira and her family who had fled Afghanistan for Pakistan after the Taliban returned to power in August 2021 – came out of their apartments and began remonstrating with the police officers.

“Our neighbours came out and shouted: ‘You cannot enter a house like this, a woman is alone there’,” she said. Shakira’s husband was at the market buying groceries and she was alone in the apartment with their four children – seven-year-old Mansoor, 10-year-old Masood, 13-year-old Milad and 17-year-old Lima.

Shakira’s husband Ahmad Fahim and their eldest child, Lima [Abid Hussain/Al Jazeera]

Shakira said the police officers eventually left, but not without being bribed. On two occasions since, other police officers have visited her home, with each set more threatening than those who came before them.

“They said if we want to continue living here, we must give them something to stay quiet or else,” she said, adding: “This is what worries me the most. They know we all live here, they can come back anytime they want and throw us away.”