📰 From the news · Other
Passports held by universities, then a war, then fees for a campus they cannot reach: the Indian and Kashmiri medical students stranded between Iran and home in 2026
Iran has long been a destination for medical students from Kashmir in particular, because of language, cost and community ties. In 2026 it became a case study in what happens to a medical education when the country around it stops working.
According to The Tribune, in January 2026 the All India Medical Students' Association urged the Indian embassy in Tehran to intervene for students whose universities were withholding their passports, and asked the government to plan an evacuation if conditions worsened. They did. Free Press Kashmir reported in June 2026 that Kashmiri medical students who had fled the war were still in India months later, missing clinical rotations and continuing to pay fees to a university they could not attend. Classes at Urmia University of Medical Sciences had resumed, the paper reported, but Indian passport holders had no straightforward way back, depending on diplomatic clearances and flight routes that did not exist.
Two separate failures are recorded here, and students should separate them. The first, universities holding students' passports, is an administrative abuse that happens in peacetime and that no student should accept; a passport belongs to its holder, and an embassy will say so. The second, a war, is not anyone's fraud, but the contract a student signs with a foreign university makes no provision for it, and the fees fall due anyway.
Iran's earlier appearance on this site concerns Iranian students sold non-existent Turkish seats; this case is the mirror, foreign students in Iran. The lesson for anyone choosing a destination is to ask the questions the brochure does not answer. Who holds your passport? What happens to your fees and your year if the campus closes? Does your home regulator accept a course interrupted and finished elsewhere? The students stranded in 2026 did not get to ask them in advance.
Were you affected by this case, or something like it? Report it with your own evidence, or tell your story — first-person accounts are what stop the next family.
This is a news-sourced case summary written by the TrustMBBS team, not a first-person account; see the sources above. They reflect one person's experience and are not a verdict on any institution. Report your own: Report a scam or tell your story.