At least 71 people, including 17 children, have been killed in western Afghanistan after a passenger bus carrying refugees, recently deported from neighbouring Iran, caught fire after colliding with a truck and motorcycle, according to provincial government spokesman Ahmadullah Muttaqi and local police.
Police in Herat province said on Tuesday that the accident was due to the bus’s “excessive speed and negligence”.
The returnees are part of a massive wave of Afghans deported or forced out of Iran in recent months.
The accident took place a day after Iranian Minister of Interior Eskandar Momeni announced that a further 800,000 people would have to leave the country by next March.
The bus was carrying Afghans recently returned from Iran and en route to the capital Kabul, provincial official Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi told the AFP news agency on Tuesday. He added that all the passengers boarded the vehicle in Islam Qala, a border crossing point.
Taliban government chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed to the dpa news agency that the victims had been deported from Iran, but said that further details were not available immediately.
Police in the Guzara district outside Afghanistan’s city of Herat, where the accident occurred, said a motorcycle was also involved.
The majority of those who died were on the bus, but two people travelling in the truck were also killed, as well as another two who were on the motorcycle.
Traffic accidents are common in Afghanistan, due in part to poor roads after decades of war, dangerous driving on highways and a lack of regulation.
Last December, two bus accidents, involving a fuel tanker and a truck on a highway through central Afghanistan, killed at least 52 people.
Every year, conflict, persecution, poverty and high unemployment drive large numbers of Afghans to cross the 300km (186-mile) Islam Qala border into Iran without documentation. Many work in low-wage jobs in big cities, including on construction sites, where they are valued as cheap and reliable labour.
Nearly 450,000 Afghans have returned from Iran since early June, according to the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), after Tehran imposed a July 6 deadline for undocumented refugees to leave the country.
The surge compounds Afghanistan’s existing challenges, as the impoverished nation, back under hardline Taliban rule since 2021, struggles to integrate waves of returnees from Pakistan and Iran since 2023, amid one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises after decades of conflict.
The UNHCR reports that more than 1.4 million people have “returned or been forced to return to Afghanistan” this year alone. Iran’s late May directive potentially affects 4 million undocumented Afghans among the approximately 6 million Afghan residents claimed by Tehran.
Border crossings increased dramatically from mid-June, with some days seeing approximately 40,000 people entering Afghanistan. Between June 1 and July 5, 449,218 Afghans returned from Iran, bringing the 2024 total to 906,326, according to an International Organization for Migration spokesman.
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