Dozens of deporting from Iran killed in a bus crash

A delayed accident in West Afghanistan has killed 79 people, including 17 children, most of whom were on a bus carrying Afghan migrants deported by Iran, a spokesman for the Taliban Ministry, confirmed to the BBC.

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

Everyone aboard the bus was killed, as well as two people from the other vehicles, Ahmadula Motaki, director of Taliban for information and culture at Herat, told the BBC Pashto earlier.

In recent months, Iran has strengthened its deportations to undocumented Afghan migrants who have escaped from a conflict in their homeland.

“All the passengers were migrants who boarded the vehicle in Islam Kala,” said provincial governor spokesman Mohammed Yusuf Sidi before AFP, citing a city near the border between Afghanistan and Iran.

Herat police said the incident was due to “the excessive speed and negligence of the bus driver,” AFP said.

Road accidents are common in Afghanistan, where roads have been damaged for decades of conflict and driving rules have not been heavily applied.

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

This has contributed to the growing anti -Afghan sentiment in Iran, with refugees facing systemic discrimination.

Previously, Iran had given a deadline for July so that Afghans were not documented to leave voluntarily.

But after a brief war with Israel in June, Iranian authorities forcibly returned hundreds of thousands of Afghans, claiming that national security concerns – although critics claim that Tehran could simply seek victims for their failures against Israeli attacks.

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

Experts warn that Afghanistan has no ability to absorb the growing number of citizens who have forcibly returned to a country under the Taliban government. The country is already fighting a large influx of returning from Pakistan, which also forces hundreds of thousands of Afghans to leave.

“The return of so many people creates additional tension on already rearranged resources. This new wave of refugees comes at a time when Afghanistan begins to feel the brutal impact of the redundancies of help,” said Arshad Malik, director of Save Afghanistan.