Afghans in Iran
|950,000 registered Afghan citizens according to the UNCHR|
|Regions with significant populations|
|Sizeable populations in Tehran, Zabol, the outskirts of Mashhad, and around the Afghanistan-Iran border|
|Persian (including Dari and Hazaragi) and other languages of Afghanistan|
|Shia and Sunni Islam|
Afghans in Iran are mostly refugees who fled wars in Afghanistan since the April 1978 Saur Revolution in Kabul. It also includes unknown number of illegal migrant workers as well as smaller number of traders, students, diplomats, tourists and other visitors. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are 950,000 registered Afghan citizens living in Iran. However, Iran's Ministry of Interior estimates that the total number of Afghans in Iran is around 3 million. The ones designated as refugees are under the care of the UNHCR, and provided legal status by the Government of Iran. They cannot obtain Iranian citizenship or permanent residency, and live in Iran under time-limited condition of stay.
Iran opened its border gates to Afghans escaping from the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the subsequent civil war but they are now asked to leave the country. Many face forceful deportation every year, which began in 2006 when about 146,387 undocumented Afghans were deported. In 2010, six Afghan prisoners were executed by being hanged in the streets of Iran, which sparked angry demonstrations in Afghanistan. Approximately 4,000 and 5,000 Afghans were reported in 2010 to be in Iranian jails.
Political history and migration
As neighbouring countries with deep ties of language, culture, and ethnicity, there has been a history of population movements between Iran and Afghanistan. Southern Afghanistan was contested between the Persian Safavid dynasty and the Moghuls of India until 1709 when Mir Wais Hotak, founder of the Hotaki dynasty, declared it independent. During the reign of Nader Shah, the brother of Ahmad Shah Durrani was made Governor of Mazandaran Province in what is now Iran. In 1747 Durrani and his Afghan army took control of the Khorasan and Kohistan provinces of Iran. The regions remained as part of the Afghan Empire but were lost to the Qajar dynasty in 1800. During the early 19th century, the Persian army of what is now Iran invaded Herat several times but with British assistance the Afghans quickly expelled them. Communities made up of 2,000 and 5,000 households of ethnic Hazaras were formed in Torbat-e Jam and Bakharz in what is now Iran. The 1857 Treaty of Paris ended hostilities of the Anglo-Persian War. The modern day Afghan-Iranian border gradually began to take shape in the second half of the 19th century.
Afghan migrant workers, pilgrims and merchants, who settled in Iran over the years, had by the early 20th century, become large enough to be officially classified as their own ethnic group, referred to variously as Khavari or Barbari. Young Hazara men have embraced migrant work in Iran and other Persian Gulf states in order to save money for marriage and become independent; such work has even come to be seen as a "rite of passage". Such migration intensified in the early 1970s due to famine, and by 1978, there were an estimated several hundred thousand Afghan migrant workers in Iran.
The Soviet war in Afghanistan, which erupted in 1979, was the beginning of a series of major waves of refugee flight from Afghanistan. Those who came to Iran often augmented the ranks of migrant workers already there. The new Islamic Republic took place around the same time as the influx of masses of Afghan migrants to other countries, fleeing the plagues of problems in their own country. Iran started recognising those Afghans listed as migrants workers or refugees as legals. They issued them "blue cards" to denote their status, entitling them to free primary and secondary education, as well as subsidised healthcare and food. However, the government maintained some restrictions on their employment, namely prohibiting them from owning their own businesses or working as street vendors.
Most of the early academic attention on these new immigrants was focused on ethnically Pashtun Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Studies on Afghans in Iran came later due to the political situation during the Iran–Iraq War. By 1992, a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that there were around 2.8 million Afghans in Iran. Just 10% were housed in refugee camps; most settled in or near urban areas. For their efforts in housing and educating these refugees and illegals, the Iranian government received little financial aid from the international community. With the fall of the Najibullah government of Afghanistan in 1992, Iran began efforts to encourage refugees to repatriate. During these years, there were many reports of cases of Afghans being harassed by Iranian law enforcement officers. Legal residents had their identity cards confiscated and exchanged with temporary residency permits of one-month validity, at the expiry of which they were expected to have left Iran and have repatriated.
Historically, Afghan used to be an exonym for Pashtuns, as such the term Afghan relatively denoted Pashtun people in Southern Afghanistan and frontier province, until the rise of Ahmed Shah Durrani where Afghan was no longer an ethnonym but became a denonym for citizens to the state under various monarchs who happened to be ethnic Pashtun.
Repatriation and deportation
Since early 2002, more than 5 million Afghans have been repatriated through the UNHCR from both Pakistan and Iran back to their native country, Afghanistan. 935,600 were still remaining according to the UNHCR. Between 2010 and 2011, a total of 24,000 Afghan refugees left Iran and returned to Afghanistan. In 2012, around 173,000 Afghans were forcefully deported. By the end of 2013, over 103,086 more were deported. Many of the deportees complained of torture and other abuses by the Iranian police. As of 2014, there are 950,000 registered Afghan citizens living in Iran.
Social life and other issues
The Afghan refugees have come to Iran since the 1980s, which included children and adolescents. Many were born in Iran over the last 30 years but unable to gain citizenship due to the Iranian law on immigration. The refugees include Hazaras, Tajiks, Qizilbash, Pashtuns, and other ethnic groups of Afghanistan. One UNHCR paper claims that nearly half the documented refugees are Hazara, a primarily Shi'a group.
In Afghanistan, some people feel that using birth control violates the tenets of their religion; however, in Iran, attitudes are far different, due to the country's extensive promotion of family planning. Afghans in Iran have moved closer to mainstream Iranian values in this regard; the Iranian influence has even filtered back into Afghanistan. One study in Khorasan has found that while overall fertility rates for Afghan migrant women are somewhat higher than those for Iranian women there—3.9 vs. 3.6—the similarity hides significant age-related differences in fertility, with older Afghan migrant women having a far higher number of children than older Iranian urban women, while younger Afghan migrant women's number of children appears to be approaching the far-lower Iranian urban norm. Contraceptive usage among the same study group was 55%, higher than for local Iranian women.
More broadly, the same conservative men who resisted aggressive attempts by communist governments in Afghanistan to expand women's education and their role in the economy, are now faced with the precise changes from which they had hoped to shield their families. Even more ironically, this shift in family and gender roles was induced by the experience of living as refugees in largely Muslim society.
Some Afghan men married Iranian women during their residence in Iran; however, under Iranian nationality law, the children of such marriages are not recognised as Iranian citizens, and it is also more difficult for the men to gain Iranian citizenship than for Afghan women married to Iranian men.
Execution of Afghans prisoners
There are approximately 3,000 Afghan prisoners face the death penalty in Iran. A number of them have been executed by hanging in the last decade. Iran has capital punishment for certain crimes such as murder, rape, and possession of large amount of control substance(narcotics) with no permit.
In popular culture
Since the 1980s, a number of Iranian movies set in Iran have featured Afghan immigrant characters. One early example is Mohsen Makhmalbaf's 1988 movie The Bicyclist, in which the character of the title, a former Afghan cycling champion, gives a demonstration in his town's square where he rides his bicycle without stopping for seven days and seven nights, with the aim of raising money for life-saving surgery for his wife. In the end, even after seven days, he continues to pedal endlessly, too fatigued to hear his son's pleas to get off his bicycle. One scholar analyses the film as an allegory which parallels the exploitation that Afghan refugees suffer from in Iran and from which they are unable to escape.
|This section requires expansion. (May 2010)|
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