Nearly 450,000 Afghans left Iran since June 1: IOM - Region
The influx comes as the country is already struggling to integrate streams of Afghans who have returned under pressure from traditional migrant and refugee hosts, Pakistan and Iran, since 2023.
The country is facing one of the world's worst humanitarian crises after decades of war.
This year alone, more than 1.4 million people have "returned or been forced to return to Afghanistan", the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said.
In late May, Iran ordered undocumented Afghans to leave the country by July 6, potentially impacting four million people out of the around six million Afghans Tehran says live in the country.
Numbers of people crossing the border surged from mid-June, with some days seeing around 40,000 people crossing, UN agencies have said.
From June 1 to July 5, 449,218 Afghans returned from Iran, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration told AFP on Monday, bringing the total this year to 906,326.
Many people crossing reported pressure from authorities or arrest and deportation, as well as losing already limited finances in the rush to leave quickly.
Massive foreign aid cuts have impacted the response to the crisis, with the UN, international non-governmental groups and Taliban officials calling for more funding to support the returnees.
The UN has warned the influx could destabilise the country, already grappling with entrenched poverty, unemployment and climate change-related shocks and urged nations not to forcibly return Afghans.
"Forcing or pressuring Afghans to return risks further instability in the region, and onward movement towards Europe," the UN refugee agency UNHCR said in a statement on Friday.
Taliban officials have repeatedly called for Afghans to be given a "dignified" return.
Iranian media regularly reports mass arrests of "illegal" Afghans in various regions.
Iran's deputy interior minister, Ali Akbar Pourjamshidian, said on Thursday that while Afghans illegally in the country were "respected neighbours and brothers in faith", Iran's "capacities also have limits".
That the ministry's return process "will be implemented gradually", he said on state TV.
Many Afghans travelled to Iran to look for work, sending crucial funds back to their families in Afghanistan.
"If I can find a job here that covers our daily expenses, I'll stay here," returnee Ahmad Mohammadi told AFP on Saturday, as he waited for support in high winds and dust at the IOM-run reception centre at the Islam Qala border point in western Herat province.
"But if that's not possible, we'll be forced to go to Iran again, or Pakistan, or some other country."
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They are the ones who get hurt, and that's why we should oppose the war, whether it's in Iran, Sudan, or Palestine. MM: And to go back 10 years, to what seemed like a moment of reformist politics, with the election of Hassan Rouhani in 2013 and the nuclear deal in 2015, do you see any relevance of that period in today's dynamics? AK: Unfortunately, there's been a kind of break with the reformist moment of the first decade of the 2000s. The pro-democracy movement needs to be reconstituted — it's not enough to invoke Mohamed Khatami, Hassan Rouhani, or others. That no longer resonates with many people who neither remember those years or don't see them as a success. There are some figures, many of them in prison, who if freed by the regime could help bring a broader constituency under a common umbrella. But because of that threat, those in power will hesitate to do so, even at this critical moment. If I am correct that there will be a moment of reckoning, then people can demand that Iran reaches a national reconciliation. At various moments over the past couple decades, that demand has come up. It came up during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. So maybe, in this particularly dramatic moment, political leadership could be pushed in that direction. Khamenei is aging and needs support in preparing the regime for new challenges. Much of the old leadership that he has around him have been killed, or embarrassed and sidelined. So maybe this is a moment when he can be convinced that regime-society relations need to be reconstituted and that he needs to create a new social base to strengthen Iran. I don't have much hope or anything concrete to point to. But there is a language of national reconciliation that could be revitalized at this particular moment, as Iranians are rethinking what independence and sovereignty mean. MM: And finally, if we re-stage Iran within its Gulf context, what are you seeing in terms of the relationship Iran is trying to preserve with its Gulf neighbors? AK: This is very significant. Iran has had a kind of working diplomatic relationship with Oman and Qatar for a long time, and to some extent with Kuwait. But importantly, two years ago, Iran also established working diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. I can't even imagine what the war in Palestine would have looked like without this rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, reached with the help of Iraq and China. The communications and strategic dialogue have probably helped reduce some of the conflicts in the region, including in Syria and Yemen, to be specific, over the past two years. During the Israeli-Iranian war, many people in the United States expected Iran to bomb the oil fields in the Gulf or close the Strait of Hormuz. I thought that was unlikely, not only because it would be bad for Iran's economy and for the rest of the region, but also because in recent years Iran has been trying to align itself more closely with Gulf interests to meet its own needs and confront Israel and the US. If you look at the UAE's statement around the sixth or seventh day of the war, it was explicitly critical of Israel and called for an end to the attacks on Iran. So, I think there is a sort of realignment that's gradually taking shape. It also sent a signal to Iran's Arab neighbors that it was able to exercise restraint, or wouldn't fall into the trap — Israel would have loved for Iran to attack the UAE or Saudi Arabia to escalate the conflict and draw the US in more quickly. At the geopolitical level, when the Abraham Accords were signed four years ago, the underlying logic was that Israel and its military would protect Bahrain, the UAE, and maybe even Saudi Arabia from Iran. But now, if I'm sitting in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi or Manama, I'd have to ask: who's going to protect us from Israel, which in the past year has bombed an increasing number of countries? So, I would think that one of the lessons that some Gulf Cooperation Council states might take from this war is that normalization with Israel doesn't guarantee regional security or increased economic investment. If we want to be optimistic, on a regional scale, maybe what this moment reveals is that regional politics and security need to be taken into consideration. Broad regional cooperation is necessary, not a luxury. Our lives are interdependent, not just in terms of war and peace, but also when it comes to the environment, migration, and infrastructure. We need to think in terms of regional politics, not solely national politics.
