European governments were trying to digest Berlin’s surprise decision to unilaterally reimpose controls on its land borders last week, when Iran’s regime announced a “sweep” operation over the next six months to deport some two million “foreigners who do not have travel documents’.
The decision mainly concerns Afghan refugees and amounts to a warning to leave the country as soon as possible. For many of them, the networks of illegal traffickers are now the only way to escape forced repatriation to the Taliban regime and reach Europe via Turkey.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates 4.5 million Afghans living in Iran, but local sources put the number at 6 and even 8 million. For four decades, Iran has been the first host country of millions of Afghans trying to escape civil wars, foreign interventions (first by the Soviets, then by the Americans and their allies), the Taliban, poverty.
Many of the Afghans who cross the heavily guarded 900 km long border do not have travel documents, are not registered in Iran, do jobs that Iranians do not want and live with the dream of fleeing to Europe. Faced with the economic crisis and the sanctions that are exacerbating the internal problems, the regime in Tehran declares that it can no longer bear the burden of foreigners.
Last May, Iran’s interior ministry announced that 1.3 million irregular migrants had been deported to Afghanistan in the previous 12 months.
The problem of Afghan refugees is the tip of the iceberg. The number of people forcibly displaced worldwide reached new record highs last year and this year, according to UNHCR, which estimates that one in 69 people on the planet has been forced to flee their homes due to war and persecution.
Increase in displaced persons
The increase in the total number of forcibly displaced people to 120 million by May 2024 reflects both new and changing conflicts and the failure to resolve long-standing crises, UNHCR found in its Global Trends report published last June. Of these, approximately 68 million remain (for now) within the borders of their countries. The number of refugees has more than tripled in a decade to over 43 million. Just 5 million internally displaced people and one million refugees returned to their homelands last year.
In Sudan, nearly 11 million people had been displaced by the end of last year because of the civil war. Of these, over 1.2 million have fled to neighboring countries, the rest are internally displaced, while 20 million (42% of the population) face the prospect of starvation. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa) and Myanmar, millions of people were internally displaced last year due to conflict.
The biggest crisis remains that of Syria with 13.8 million displaced inside and outside the country. The refugees from Syria are estimated at 6.4 million and the same number are registered from Afghanistan, while the refugees from Ukraine amount to 6 million. In the Gaza Strip, the displaced Palestinians are approaching 2 million, but they remain trapped between the shores of the Mediterranean, Israel and Egypt.
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