Dozens of Iran’s deportees killed in a bus accident

A traffic accident in western Afghanistan has killed 79 people, including 17 children, most of whom were on a bus transporting Afghan migrants expelled from Iran, confirmed a spokesperson for the Interior of the Taliban.

The bus, on the way to Kabul, caught fire on Tuesday evening after colliding with a truck and a motorcycle in the province of Herat.

Everyone aboard the bus was killed, as well as two people from the other vehicles, Ahmadullah Mottaqi, director of information and culture of the Taliban in Herat, told BBC Pashto earlier.

In recent months, Iran has intensified its deportations of undocumented Afghan migrants who have fled conflicts in their homeland.

“All the passengers were migrants who had climbed on the vehicle at Islam Qala,” the spokesman for the provincial governor, Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, told AFP, referring to a city near the Afghan-Iranian border.

Herat police said the accident occurred due to the “excessive speed and negligence” of the bus driver, AFP reported.

Traffic accidents are common in Afghanistan, where roads have been damaged by decades of conflict and driving regulations are not highly applied.

Since the 1970s, millions of Afghans have fled to Iran and Pakistan, with major waves during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and after the return of the Taliban in power in 2021.

This has contributed to the growth of anti-Afghan feeling in Iran, with refugees faced with systemic discrimination.

Iran had previously given a deadline for July for undocumented Afghans to go voluntarily.

But since a brief war with Israel in June, the Iranian authorities have forcibly made hundreds of thousands of Afghans, alleging national security problems – although Téhéran could simply look for scapegoats for its security failures against Israeli attacks.

More than 1.5 million Afghans have left Iran since January, according to the United Nations Agency for Refugees. Some have been in Iran for generations.

Experts warn Afghanistan does not have the capacity to absorb the growing number of nationals who have been returned by force in a country under the Taliban government. The country is already struggling with a large influx of repatriated Pakistan, which also requires hundreds of thousands of Afghans from.

“The return of so many people creates additional pressure on the already overvalued resources, and this new wave of refugees arrives at a time when Afghanistan begins to feel the brutal impacts of the aid cuts,” said Arshad Malik, national director of Save The Children Afghanistan.