UN official: Iran has deported 360,000 Afghan refugees
The American newspaper The Wall Street Journal wrote on Sunday, December 11, in a field report from the Afghan border with Iran that the Islamic Republic of Iran has increased the deportation of Afghan refugees who are trying to escape the Taliban and poverty, and that these deportations have taken on an unprecedented trend.
The newspaper, reporting from Zaranj, the capital of Nimroz province and one of Afghanistan's border cities with Iran, wrote, "Iran has deported hundreds of thousands of Afghans in recent months and is unwilling to consider their asylum applications." A UN official put the number of deported people at 360,000.
According to this report, in this section of the border alone, between 2,500 and 4,000 Afghans are deported daily by Iranian agents and taken to Zaranj, and this situation has caused border tensions in the region.
The Zaranj border is the same area that witnessed an armed clash between Taliban forces and Iranian border guards on December 1 of this year.
A UN official told the Wall Street Journal that “Iranian authorities simply bring people to the border area and drop them off, and the rate of deportations has been increasing dramatically since the Taliban took over.”
Most of these people returned from Iran are forced to cross the border bridge known as the "Silk Bridge," and the traffic and climatic conditions of this border area are described in reports as bad and dire.
From August, when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, until December 5 of this year, nearly half a million Afghans who had entered Iran illegally have returned.
According to UN officials, about 360,000 of them have been deported from Iran and 126,000 have returned "voluntarily," but according to the Wall Street Journal, UN officials say many of these people may have returned out of fear of deportation.
Iran is home to more than three million Afghan citizens, most of whom are migrant workers and refugees. Many of them are undocumented, meaning they are deprived of social protections and at risk of detention and deportation.
Iranian security forces routinely raid factories and businesses, rounding up those without legal documents.
According to the UN refugee agency, Iran and Pakistan host about 90 percent of the 2.6 million Afghans registered as refugees worldwide, the second-largest refugee population in the world after Syrians.
A day before the Wall Street Journal report, on Saturday, December 10, the AFP also published a report stating that aid organizations and witnesses in the region say that Iran is returning tens of thousands of Afghan refugees to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan every week, and many of these Afghans say they have been mistreated by Iranian authorities.
Returned Afghans who spoke to AFP said they were held in crowded and dirty detention centers in Iran, and some were beaten before being transferred to the border crossing.
Numerous reports indicate that asylum seekers whose asylum applications have not been processed by Iran and who have been forcibly returned face financial difficulties and increased poverty upon their return, as they have used up most of their savings for long journeys to Iran.
Source: Voice of America
