KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) Iran is forcefully deporting Afghans by the thousands in violation of its international obligation to protect refugees, said a Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday.
The report included stories of fathers deported without being given a chance to tell the families they leave behind. It said a 12-year old boy was left without money at the border, forced to beg for bus fare to Afghanistan.
Millions of Afghans fled to Iran and Pakistan in the 1980s to flee a bloody anti-Communist insurgency. At the peak of the war, roughly 5 million refugees lived in Pakistan and nearly 4 million in Iran. Currently the Human Rights Watch estimates about 2 million Afghans still live in Iran as unregistered refugees some having returned to Afghanistan only to come back once again to Iran driven back by lack of jobs and a deteriorating security situation in their homeland.
But Iran has refused to register many of them, said Faraz Sanei, Human Rights Watch researcher for Middle East and North Africa. Roughly another 840,000 Afghans live in Iran as registered refugees.
Senei said the report's authors spent more than one year on Afghanistan's western border with Iran interviewing refugees as they straggled across the border, some telling horrific tales of being beaten and abused.