17 children among 70 killed as bus carrying deportees from Iran crashes in Afghanistan's Herat province
PTC News Desk: At least seventy people were killed and several others injured after a bus carrying deportees from Iran crashed and caught fire in Afghanistan's Herat province.
"All the passengers were migrants who had boarded the vehicle in Islam Qala," provincial governor spokesman Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi told AFP, referring to a town near the Afghanistan–Iran border.
A bus traveling to Kabul caught fire on Tuesday night after colliding with a truck and a motorcycle in Afghanistan’s Herat province, said Ahmadullah Mottaqi, the Taliban’s director of information and culture in Herat.
He confirmed that everyone on the bus, along with two people from the other vehicles, lost their lives in the accident.
In recent months, Iran has intensified deportations of undocumented Afghan migrants who fled the ongoing conflict at home. Road accidents remain frequent in Afghanistan, where decades of war have left infrastructure in poor condition and traffic rules are poorly enforced.
Since the 1970s, millions of Afghans have sought refuge in Iran and Pakistan, particularly during the Soviet invasion in 1979 and again after the Taliban regained power in 2021.
This mass migration has fueled rising anti-Afghan sentiment in Iran, where refugees often face systemic discrimination. Iran had earlier set a July deadline for undocumented Afghans to leave the country voluntarily.
- PTC NEWS
