More than 70 Afghans died in a bus accident in northern Afghanistan on Tuesday, local officials said, after the vehicle collided with a truck and a motorbike in Herat Province, on the border with Iran. It was one of countless buses that have been ferrying Afghan refugees expelled en masse from Iran this year.
Of the 78 people killed, 71 were bus passengers returning from Iran and 17 were children, Ahmadullah Muttaqi, a provincial communication official, said.
About 1.8 million Afghan nationals who lived in Iran for years, some for decades, have been expelled from Iran or forcibly returned to Afghanistan this year as Iranian officials have vowed to expel undocumented nationals.
The returning Afghans, many of whom fled after the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan in 2021, have come back to a changed country where most women can’t work, girls can’t go to school beyond sixth grade and more than half of the population of 41 million is in need of humanitarian assistance.
More than 1.2 million people have returned just since June, most of them dropped off at a border crossing in Herat Province. Shortly after its war with Israel in May, Iran began accusing Afghans of spying on behalf of Israel and ramped up mass expulsions.
Most of the deportations have followed the same pattern that has left countless Afghans confused and in a state of shock, according to two dozen returning Afghans and aid workers interviewed by New York Times journalists who visited the border last month.
In Iran, Afghans who have been arrested at home or at their workplace have been sent to deportation centers, where buses then drive them to the Afghan side of the border. Afterward, they have trudged their belongings to a transit center managed by the Afghan authorities and United Nations agencies.
Once they have registered as returnees and received a stipend, Afghans usually board buses commissioned by the Afghan government and bound for Herat, the province’s capital, or Kabul, 18 hours away.
It was a bus bound for Kabul that crashed Tuesday night. The treacherous two-lane road it used is regularly battered by sandstorms, making it hard to spot opposing traffic.
A video shared on X by Etilaatroz, an Afghan news outlet, showed rescue workers trying to put out flames spewing out of a charred bus. Most of the victims were from the provinces of Kapisa, Parwan and Ghazni, all in the vicinity of Kabul, according to a list released by Mr. Muttaqi.
The victims’ bodies were transferred to Kabul on Wednesday.
Many returning Afghans arrive without jobs and often without a house awaiting them. In Kabul, landlords have been expelling tenants to make space for their returning relatives as housing prices soar.
Iran, as well as neighboring Pakistan, has hosted millions of Afghan refugees for decades, many of them undocumented.
Humanitarian organizations and U.N. agencies have urged governments from both countries to return Afghans in a gradual and humane way, so far with little success. This month, Pakistan’s government announced that it, too, would begin the deportation of more than 1.3 million Afghan refugees living legally in Pakistan.
Elian Peltier is an international correspondent for The Times, covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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