2024-10-12 02:11:00
In Iran, around 270,000 Afghans were forced to leave the country within six months. Compared to the previous year, around 40 percent more people were deported to the neighboring country, as a high-ranking official in the border province of Razawi-Khorasan said. Among them are Afghans without a valid residence permit as well as people from the neighboring country who had registered to leave the country, the state news agency Irna reported.
“Identifying illegal foreign nationals throughout the country and repatriating them” is one of the Interior Ministry’s most important projects, said the local director general for migration, Hussein Sharafati-Rad. In the provincial capital Mashhad, 60,000 Afghans are legally enrolled in schools and universities, he added. Mashhad, Iran’s third largest city, is about 250 kilometers from the border.
Iran’s government wants to deport around two million foreigners without valid residence status by the end of March 2025. Domestic political debates have been raging in Iran for months about the high number of refugees from Afghanistan who left the neighboring country in droves after the Taliban came to power three years ago.
According to estimates by the UN refugee agency, almost 4.5 million Afghans live in Iran, many of them without legal residence status. According to Iranian media reports, there could also be six or eight million Afghans. In major cities, many of them work in the low-wage sector, for example in small supermarkets or on construction sites.
Ongoing conflict, extreme poverty and high unemployment force thousands of Afghans to cross the border into Iran illegally every year. The neighboring countries share a border that is more than 900 kilometers long in partly uninhabited areas, which makes border controls difficult. Meanwhile, Iran is building a guarded border wall in the northeast of the country. Afghanistan’s neighboring country Pakistan also expelled a large number of refugees.
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