Financial Times:
Bita Ghaffari in Tehran
Iran has expelled thousands of undocumented Afghans in the wake of its 12-day war with Israel, accelerating a mass deportation campaign as paranoia about Israeli infiltration during the conflict fuels anti-migrant sentiment.
The UN’s refugee agency UNHCR said that the number of daily returns to Afghanistan from Iran — which launched a deportation campaign earlier this year — soared from about 5,000 to 30,000 after the war, adding that the majority had been sent forcibly.
“The sheer volume of returns — many abrupt, many involuntary — should be setting off alarm bells across the global community,” Roza Otunbayeva, the UN special representative for Afghanistan, said this week.
More than 1,300 Iranian activists, actors and journalists this month called in an open letter for a stop to the “inhumane” treatment of Afghan migrants on the “baseless accusation” that they are part of an espionage and penetration network.
“This appears to be an attempt to take revenge for Israel’s criminal attack . . . not on certain groups within this million-strong population but on all Afghans,” they wrote.
Iran, the world’s largest refugee hosting country, was home to some 6mn Afghans who fled decades of war, repression and poverty across the border. Authorities say more than 2mn people entered Iran after the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 2021.
Iran says nearly 800,000 Afghans have been deported since it started the deportation campaign in March, citing the burden on the Islamic republic’s already weakened economy of hosting millions of migrants while under international sanctions.
Go to link
Comments