A traffic accident in western Afghanistan has killed 73 people, including 17 children, most of which were on a bus carrying the Afghan migrants exempted from Iran, a Taliban officer confirmed BBC Pashto.
After hitting a truck and motorcycle in Herat province, the bus for Kabul, the bus caught fire, said Ahmadullah Motaki, director of the information and culture of the Taliban in Herat.
He said that all the people in the bus were killed, as well as two people of other vehicles.
In recent months, Iran has carried forward its exile of unspecified Afghan migrants who have fled from the struggle in their motherland.
Referring to a city near the border of Afghanistan -Iran, the spokesman of the provincial governor, Mohammad Yusuf Saeedi, said, “All the passengers were migrants who were riding in a vehicle in Islam Qala.”
Herat police said that the accident occurred due to the “excess speed and negligence” of the bus driver, the AFP reported.
Traffic accidents are common in Afghanistan, where roads have been damaged by decades of struggle and driving rules are not firmly implemented.
Since the 1970s, millions of Afghans have fled to Iran and Pakistan, with major waves, during the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and returning to power in 2021.
This has contributed to the growing Afghan spirit in Iran, in which refugees are facing systemic discrimination.
Iran had earlier given a July deadline for unspecified Afghans to leave voluntarily.
But since a brief war with Israel in June, Iranian officials have forcibly returned thousands of Afghans, although calling of national security concerns – although critics say that Tehran can find a sacrifice goat for his safety failures against the Israeli attacks.
According to the United Nations refugee agency, more than 1.5 million Afghans have left Iran since January. Some generations had been in Iran for generations.
Experts warned that under the Taliban government in Afghanistan, there is a lack of ability to absorb the increasing number of citizens returning to a country. The country is already struggling with a major influx of those who return from Pakistan, forcing hundreds of thousands of Afghans to leave.
“The return of many people is already causing an additional stress on overseased resources, and this new wave of refugees comes when Afghanistan has begun to feel the cruel impacts of the cuts,” said Arshad Malik, director of the country of Children’s country, said.
