The US ‘war on terror’ or the ‘war in Afghanistan’, which initiated on October 2001 in response to the 9/11 attacks on the United States after two decades of civil war and serious human rights abuses, has forced millions of Afghan men, women and children to flee their homes and seek refuge in the neighboring countries.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, about ninety thousand Afghan refugees have by now been forcibly returned to Afghanistan from Iran in the last two months.
Many refugees are forced to return even without their families as the reference number had already been scrawled on their hands in thick black ink that doesn’t allow them to stay there anymore. A young refugee, waiting for his turn to come back to Afghanistan, asserted,
My wife and children are left there (Iran), even though I asked the authorities to let us go together. I didn’t even have time to get my wages from my employer. Now that they deported me who will look after my children? If someone throws them on the street who will give them shelter? This is cruelty.
Returning Afghan refugees are now left with no other option than to start their lives all over again in a country where they used to live under continuous threat of gun and battles.
After long years of refuge in neighboring nations, Afghan refugees are now facing an uncertain future as they have to turn back to their own nation where they neither have security of life nor work to earn their livelihood.
Though, the Iranian government has its own excuses in repatriating Afghan refugees living illegally on its soil, but it’s too hard on the refugees to send them forcibly to a volatile place with no work and life security.
