A tragic road accident in western Afghanistan has killed 73 people, including 17 children, most of whom were Afghan migrants deported from Iran, a Taliban official has confirmed to BBC Pashto.
According to Ahmadullah Mottaqi, director of information and culture in Herat, the bus traveling to Kabul burst into flames on Tuesday evening after colliding with a truck and a motorbike in Herat province. He added that all passengers on the bus were killed, as were two people from the other vehicles involved in the accident.
The provincial governor's spokesman, Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, told AFP that "all the passengers were migrants who had boarded the vehicle in Islam Qala," a town near the border between Afghanistan and Iran.
Herat police said the accident was caused by the bus driver's "high speed and carelessness." Road accidents are common in Afghanistan, where roads have been damaged by decades of conflict and traffic laws are often ignored.
Since the 1970s, millions of Afghans have fled to Iran and Pakistan, especially during the Soviet invasion in 1979 and after the Taliban's return to power in 2021. This has significantly increased anti-Afghan sentiment in Iran, where refugees face systematic discrimination.
Iran had set a July deadline for the voluntary departure of undocumented Afghans, but after a brief conflict with Israel in June, Iranian authorities began forcibly deporting hundreds of thousands of Afghans, citing national security concerns. Critics say Tehran is seeking to scapegoats for its own security failures in response to Israeli attacks.
According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), more than 1.5 million Afghans have fled Iran since January – many of whom had been there for generations. Experts warn that Afghanistan does not have the capacity to cope with this new wave of forced returns, while the country is already under pressure from massive returns from Pakistan. “The return of so many people is creating an additional burden on already stretched resources, and this new wave of refugees comes at a time when Afghanistan is experiencing the painful consequences of the cessation of aid,” said Arshad Malik, Save the Children’s Afghanistan director.
