Frozen bodies of 13 asylum seekers discovered on Iran-Türkiye border

Thirteen refugees have died of freezing temperatures on the Iran-Turkey border. A Turkish human rights group in Van province said the refugees were Afghan and Syrian nationals who were caught in the blizzard.

The German news agency reported on Sunday, February 9, citing a human rights group in the Turkish city of Van, that 13 refugees died of cold in the Turkish province of Van, which borders Iran. The human rights group said in a tweet about the deaths that the refugees died after being caught in a blizzard in the extreme cold of the Chaldaran mountains after entering Turkey from the Iranian border.

Van Governor Mufti Emin Bimelez told Anadolu Agency that he had received information that 13 refugees had died from the cold after illegally crossing the border. The local official said that the Disaster and Emergency Management Center, known as Afad, was unable to provide relief efforts due to the stormy weather and severe blizzard.

The nationality of the migrants was initially unclear, but according to the Turkish newspaper "Oransal", 10 of the victims of the incident were Afghan citizens and three others were from the Syrian city of Kobani.

But this is not the first time that such a deadly incident has occurred on the Iran-Turkey border, especially for Afghan refugees. Frozen bodies of Afghan refugees have been discovered on the Turkey-Iran border many times before.

Dr. Zakira Hekmat, a rights defender for Afghan refugees in Turkey and a founding member of the “Association for Solidarity and Sympathy with Afghan Refugees,” told DW Persian about the bodies discovered in mid-2019: “The incident of discovering bodies has happened before and we witness this every year. When refugees illegally try to enter Turkey, they have to cross the borders of the mountainous regions of Turkey. When the migrants walk this route on foot, they encounter problems and some of them get stuck under several meters of snow and freeze to death from the extreme cold. The bodies are covered in snow, but later, when the snow melts, the local people discover the smell of the bodies and inform the gendarmerie.”

Hekmat told DW Persian that families from Afghanistan contact their association and discuss taking over the bodies. The survivors then transport the bodies to their country at their own expense.

According to Zakira Hekmat, conditions inside Afghanistan have become difficult and people have no hope for the future and are migrating.

Zakaria Barakzai from the Afghan Consulate in Istanbul told DW that insecurity, poverty, and unemployment have caused tens of thousands of Afghans to migrate. They illegally reach Turkey with the intention of going to European countries.