A traffic accident in western Afghanistan has killed 79 people, including 17 children, most of whom were on a bus carrying Afghan migrants deported from Iran, a Taliban interior ministry spokesperson confirmed to the BBC.
The bus, en route 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, Ahmadullah Mottaqi, the Taliban’s director of information and culture in Herat, told BBC Pashto earlier.
In recent months, Iran has stepped up its deportations of undocumented Afghan migrants who have fled conflict in their homeland.
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“All the passengers were migrants who had boarded the vehicle in Islam Qala,” provincial governor spokesman Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi told AFP, referring to a town near the Afghanistan–Iran border.
Herat police said the accident happened because of the bus driver’s “excessive speed and negligence”, AFP reported.
Traffic accidents are common in Afghanistan, where roads have been damaged by decades of conflict and driving regulations are not strongly enforced.
Since the 1970s, millions of Afghans have fled to Iran and Pakistan, with major waves during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.
This has contributed to growing anti-Afghan sentiment in Iran, with refugees facing systemic discrimination.
Iran had previously given a July deadline for undocumented Afghans to depart voluntarily.
But since a brief war with Israel in June, Iranian authorities have forcibly returned hundreds of thousands of Afghans, alleging national security concerns.
However, critics say Tehran may simply be looking for scapegoats for its security failures against Israeli attacks.
More than 1.5 million Afghans have left Iran since January, according to the UN Refugee Agency. Some had been in Iran for generations.
Experts warn Afghanistan cannot absorb the growing number of nationals forcibly returned to a country under Taliban rule.
The country is already struggling with a large influx of returnees from Pakistan, which is also forcing hundreds of thousands of Afghans to leave.
“The return of so many people is creating an additional strain on already overstretched resources, and this new wave of refugees comes at a time when Afghanistan is starting to feel the brutal impacts of aid cuts,” said Arshad Malik, country director of Save the Children Afghanistan.
