Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, has welcomed back Sharbat Gula, the green-eyed “Afghan Girl” whose photo in National Geographic in 1985 became a symbol of her country’s wars, after she was deported by Pakistan.

Pakistani security officials escorted Gula overnight from a hospital in Peshawar, where she had been staying since her arrest last month for living illegally in the country, and handed her over to Afghan authorities at the Torkham border.

Gula’s deportation comes amid Pakistani pressure to send 2.5 million Afghan refugees back home even though Afghanistan is facing a bloody Taliban insurgency and would struggle to look after so many returnees.

“I welcome her back to the bosom of her motherland,” Ghani said as an expressionless Gula stood beside him during a small ceremony at the palace in Kabul. “I’ve said repeatedly, and I like to repeat it again, that our country is incomplete until we absorb all of our refugees.”

Photographer Steve McCurry next to his photos of Sharbat Gula. Photograph: Ulrich Perrey/AFP

Ghani promised to provide Gula with a furnished apartment to ensure she “lives with dignity and security in her homeland”.

Gula, wearing a blue burqa that was pulled back to show her face, did not comment during the ceremony, which her children also attended.

She was for years an unnamed celebrity after an image of her as a teenage refugee was featured on National Geographic magazine’s cover in 1985, her striking green eyes peering out from a headscarf.

The image became a symbol of Afghanistan’s suffering during the 1980s Soviet occupation and the US-backed mujahadeen insurgency against it.

The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 led to the collapse of the Kabul government and years of civil war until the Islamist Taliban movement seized power in the mid-1990s.

After the Taliban regime fell to the US-backed military action in 2001, National Geographic sent the photographer Steve McCurry to find the girl in the photo, eventually identified as Gula.

“The woman who stands next to me became an iconic figure representing Afghan deprivation, Afghan hope and Afghan aspirations,” Ghani said. “All of us are inspired by her courage and determination.“

Gula had been living in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar for years with her children and husband, who died five years ago.

