More than 250,000 Afghans left Iran in June, UN says
More than 250,000 Afghans left Iran in June alone, marking a surge in returns to Afghanistan since Tehran set a hard deadline for repatriations, the UN’s migration agency said.
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) recorded as many as 28,000 Afghans leaving Iran in a single day in June, after the Iranian regime ordered all undocumented Afghans to leave the country by July 6.
The number of Afghan refugees in neighbouring Iran has swelled since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in 2021, many of whom live without legal status.
This has contributed to growing anti-Afghan sentiment in Iran, with refugees facing systemic discrimination.
The IOM said more than 700,000 Afghans had left Iran since January, with spokesperson Avand Azeez Agha telling news agency AFP that 70 per cent had been “forcibly sent back”.
The surge in repatriations – and the deadline – have come since Iran and Israel engaged in direct conflict with one another, beginning with Israel attacking nuclear and military sites in mid-June. A ceasefire has since been brokered.
As the two exchanged daily strikes, the Iranian regime arrested several Afghan migrants it suspected of spying for Israel, state media reported.
Following these claims, a new wave of deportations began. The semi-official Iranian Mehr news agency reported that police had been directed to accelerate deportations, though the police later denied this.
“We’re scared to go anywhere because there’s always the fear they might accuse us of being spies,” one Afghan migrant in Iran, who we are not naming to protect their identity, told BBC Persian.
“At the checkpoints, they do body searches and check people’s phones. If they find any messages or videos from foreign media on social networks, it could literally put someone’s life in danger.
“Many Iranians insult us, saying things like: ‘you Afghans are spies’ or ‘you work for Israel’.”
Numerous reports in Iranian media indicate that even Afghans with valid visas and documentation have been forcibly deported. Some Afghans who were detained and later freed said they were accused by officials of betraying the country.
Arafat Jamal, the UN’s refugee co-ordinator for Afghanistan, said that while there was now a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, “the consequences of that war continue”.
“This movement pre-dates the war, but it has been exacerbated by it,” he told BBC Pashto.
“And what we hear from the returnees is a series of actions that have caused them to come back, some of them quite coercive, others not as much.”
Arafat Jamal said UN humanitarian provisions at the Afghan border had been “overwhelmed”
—BBC
