A devastating traffic accident in western Afghanistan has claimed the lives of 73 people, including 17 children, most of them Afghan migrants recently deported from Iran, a Taliban official confirmed to BBC Pashto.
The tragedy occurred on Tuesday night in Herat province, when a bus travelling to Kabul collided with a truck and motorcycle before bursting into flames, according to Ahmadullah Mottaqi, the Taliban’s director of information and culture in Herat.
“All passengers on the bus were killed, along with two people from the other vehicles,” Mottaqi said.
The victims were Afghan deportees who had boarded the bus in Islam Qala, a town near the Afghanistan–Iran border, provincial governor’s spokesman Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi told AFP.
Herat police said the crash was caused by the bus driver’s “excessive speed and negligence,” AFP reported.
Road accidents are frequent in Afghanistan, where decades of war have left highways in disrepair and traffic rules are often poorly enforced.
Since the 1970s, millions of Afghans have sought refuge in Iran and Pakistan, with large waves of migration during the Soviet invasion of 1979 and after the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. But in recent years, Afghans in Iran have faced growing hostility and systemic discrimination.
Iran had set a July deadline for undocumented Afghans to leave voluntarily. However, following a brief conflict with Israel in June, Tehran began forcibly expelling hundreds of thousands of Afghan nationals, citing national security concerns. Critics argue the move is an attempt to deflect attention from its security failures against Israeli attacks.
The UN Refugee Agency reports that more than 1.5 million Afghans have left Iran since January, some from families who had lived there for generations.
Humanitarian organisations warn Afghanistan cannot cope with the influx. The Taliban-led country is already under strain from mass deportations from Pakistan and faces a worsening humanitarian crisis amid international aid cuts.
“The return of so many people is putting enormous pressure on already overstretched resources. This wave of returnees comes just as Afghanistan begins to feel the devastating effects of reduced aid,” said Arshad Malik, country director of Save the Children Afghanistan.
Source: BBC
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