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    * Afghans in Iran *

    افغانها در ایران

    (Wikipedia) - Afghans in Iran This article is about citizens of Afghanistan living in Iran. For Pashtuns in Iran, see Pashtun diaspora#Pashtuns in the Middle East. Afghans in Iran Total population Regions with significant populations Languages Religion
    1،452،513(Census 2011) 935,600 (2010)
    Pashto, Dari, Persian
    Sunni Islam · Shia Islam

    Afghans in Iran are mostly refugees and illegal immigrantswho fled Afghanistan since the 1980s Soviet war. It also includes a small minority of traders, businesspeople, workers, students, diplomats, tourists and other visitors. As of March 2009, more than 1 million Afghan nationals were reported to be living in Iran. The ones designated as refugees are under the protection and care of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and provided legal status by the Government of Iran. Afghan refugees cannot obtain Iranian citizenship or permanent residency, and live in Iran under time-limited condition of stay.

    Iran opened its border gates to millions of fleeing Afghans from the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the subsequent civil war but they are now asked to leave the country. As the vast majority of the Afghans in Iran are illegals, many Afghans are forcefully deported back to Afghanistan every year, which began in 2006 when about 146,387 undocumented Afghans were deported. In 2010, 6 Afghan criminals were executed by being hanged in the streets of Iran, which sparked angry demonstrations in Afghanistan. Approximately 4,000 and 5,000 Afghans were in Iranian jails in 2010.


    Political history and migration Further information: Afghanistan–Iran relationsA miniature from Padshahnama depicting the surrender of the Persian Safavid garrison of Kandahar in 1638 to the Mughals, which was re-taken by the Persians in 1650 during the Mughal-Safavid war.

    As neighbouring countries with some cultural links, there has been a history of population movements between Iran and what is now Afghanistan. Southern Afghanistan was controlled by the Persian Safavid dynasty until 1709 when Mirwais Hotak, founder of the Hotaki dynasty, declared it independent. After the death of Nader Shah and the decades lasting political unrest, Ahmad Shah Durrani and his Afghan army briefly conquered the Khorasan and Kohistan provinces of Iran. The regions stayed part of the Afghan Empire until they were reconquered by the successors of Nader Shah, shahs of the Afsharid Dynasty. During the early 19th century, the Persians invaded Herat several times but with extensive help of the British, the Afghans managed to repel them. In 1850s, when Persian forces invaded Herat in Afghanistan for the last time, 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. 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.

    Social life and other issuesAfghan boys in Isfahan, Iran.

    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, Pashtuns, Tajiks, 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 in Iran

    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 son. 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.

    Other notable films with Afghan characters include Jafar Panahi''s 1996 The White Balloon, Abbas Kiarostami''s 1997 A Taste of Cherry, Majid Majidi''s 2000 Baran, and Bahram Bayzai''s 2001 Sagkoshi.

    Notable people
    This section requires expansion. (May 2010)

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