Afghan Migrants Deported from Iran Among Dozens Killed in Bus Crash

A tragic traffic accident in western Afghanistan has claimed 73 lives, including 17 children, most of them Afghan migrants recently deported from Iran, a Taliban official told to the media.

The incident occurred in Herat province on Tuesday night when a bus heading to Kabul collided with a truck and a motorcycle, causing the bus to catch fire, said Ahmadullah Mottaqi, Taliban’s director of information and culture in Herat.

All passengers on the bus died, along with two people from the other vehicles.

The tragedy comes amid a surge in deportations of undocumented Afghan migrants from Iran in recent months.

“All the passengers were migrants who had boarded the vehicle in Islam Qala, a town near the Afghanistan–Iran border,” provincial governor’s spokesman Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi said to the media.

According to Herat police, the crash was caused by the bus driver’s “excessive speed and negligence,” media reported.

Traffic accidents are frequent in Afghanistan, where decades of conflict have left roads in poor condition and driving rules are weakly enforced.

Since the 1970s, millions of Afghans have fled to Iran and Pakistan, first during the Soviet invasion in 1979 and again after the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. This mass migration has fueled rising anti-Afghan sentiment in Iran, where refugees often face systemic discrimination.

Iran had previously set a July deadline for undocumented Afghans to leave voluntarily. However, following its brief war with Israel in June, Tehran has forcibly deported hundreds of thousands, citing national security threats. Critics argue the government is using Afghans as scapegoats for its failure to prevent Israeli attacks.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, more than 1.5 million Afghans have left Iran since January, some of whom had lived there for generations. Experts warn that Afghanistan, already under Taliban rule and grappling with large numbers of returnees from Pakistan, lacks the capacity to absorb the growing influx of deportees.

Also Read: Trump Doubled Tariffs on India to Deter Russia, Says White House