Undocumented migrants in Iran, mostly from neighboring Afghanistan, have until the end of the current year on the Persian calendar, March 20, to leave the country, the Iranian police chief said on Wednesday.
Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir Saeid Iravani, has highlighted Tehran’s endeavors to deal with extremism and underdevelopment in Afghanistan. Iravani said Iran is hosting more than six million Afghans at an annual cost of 10 billion dollars, despite Western sanctions.
The secretary of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights and deputy head of the Iranian Judiciary says Iran has received over eight million refugees from neighboring Afghanistan, contrasting the number with the seven to eight million people the US has killed since its establishment.
The Iranian interior minister says Iran is overwhelmed with the influx of Afghan refugees who are a burden on the country’s already-strained resources and sanctions-hit economy.
A mine explosion on the border between Iran and Iraq claimed the life of an illegal Afghan migrant and injured four others, the governor of the western Iranian town of Mehran said on Friday.
The foreign minister of the caretaker government in Afghanistan Amir Khan Muttaqi visited representatives of Afghan migrants in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad on Monday, calling on all Afghans in Iran to return to their homeland as he said the conditions are back to normal.
Amir Khan Mottaghi, Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of Afghanistan, expressed the nation's commitment to creating an environment conducive to the repatriation of Afghan immigrants.
Mulla Abul Ghani Baradar, the Deputy Prime Minister of Afghanistan's caretaker government for economic affairs, appreciated Tehran for sheltering Afghan refugees seeking asylum in the Islamic Republic over the past decades.
Iran says it will follow a stricter agenda to extradite illegal foreign migrants, a vast majority of them Afghans, to their home countries and will make the arrangements to organize the legal arrivals.
The United Nations has admired Iran, as the second largest host of refugees in the world, for its health services to Afghan refugees and has promised support for the future efforts.
Afghan nationals residing in Iran have gathered in the city of Qom, south of Tehran, from across the country to join a traditional wrestling competition.
An Afghan national has killed six other Afghans and four Iranians in southeastern Iranian county of Rafsanjan in a stabbing spree following what the police called “personal differences”.
A United Nations refugee agency official has praised Iran for bending over backwards to improve living conditions for millions of refugees during the past four decades and especially after the Taliban takeover in neighboring Afghanistan last year which triggered an influx of refugees.
The Iranian Interior Ministry says all foreign nationals, who are staying in the country illegally, will be immediately deported if they fail to register with the ministry’s offices for registration of illegal immigrants by Wednesday.
Iran’s Interior Ministry says Afghans who fail to participate in an ongoing census for foreigners will be treated as illegal and deported from the country.
An Iranian health expert warns that the country’s northeastern Khorasan Razavi, which borders Afghanistan, is facing the risk of a measles outbreak amid a rise in the cases of the highly-contagious disease in the neighboring country.
An Iranian daily warns against a rise in the number of Afghan refugees arriving in Iran every day, saying the total number of the refugees seeking shelter in the Islamic Republic has reached 8 million so far.
