Iran walls off part of border with Afghanistan

Iran’s military has built a wall along more than 10 kilometers of its eastern border with Afghanistan, the main entry point for immigrants, Iranian media reported Monday.

“More than 10 kilometers of walls have been built on the border and another 50 kilometers is ready to be walled off,” ISNA news agency said, citing General Nozar Nemati, deputy commander of army ground forces, AFP reported.

Iran shares a more than 900 km border with Afghanistan, and hosts one of the largest refugee populations in the world.

The flow of Afghan immigrants has increased since the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan took over in August 2021 after US forces withdrew.

Tehran has not given official figures for the number of Afghan immigrants, but member of parliament Abolfazl Torabi has estimated their number at “between six and seven million”.

The authorities have recently increased pressure on “illegal” refugees, regularly announcing expulsions through the eastern border.

“By blocking the border, we want to control the country’s entries and exits” and “better increase the security of border areas”, Nemati said.

In September, Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni said Iran would employ other methods including barbed wire and water-filled ditches in addition to the wall to block the border.

On September 13, the spokesman for the parliamentary National Security Committee, Ebrahim Rezaei, said police plan to “expel more than two million illegal citizens in the near future”.

According to the official IRNA news agency, Afghans represent “more than 90 percent of foreign nationals” in Iran, and “most of them enter the country without identity papers”.

President Masoud Pezeshkian has said his government plans to “repatriate illegal nationals to their country in a respectful manner”.

In the year starting in March 2023 Iran hosted more than 2.7 million documented Afghan refugees, according to the Statistics Centre.

That figure represents 97 per cent of legal migrants in the country.