TEHRAN: Up to 5,000 Afghan refugees a day are crossing into neighboring Iran, compounding the already heavy burden it faces hosting an estimated 3.6 million Afghans, a relief group said Wednesday.
The Norwegian Refugee Council called for more international support for Iran, which despite facing tough US economic sanctions, operates what the council described as one of the most inclusive refugee policies in the world.
“Iran cannot be expected to host so many Afghans with so little support from the international community,” the council’s secretary general Jan Egeland said after a visit to Iran this week.
“There must be an immediate scale up of aid both inside Afghanistan and in neighboring countries like Iran, before the deadly winter cold.”
The council said it was estimated that at least 300,000 Afghans had crossed into Iran since the Taliban entered Kabul as US-led troops withdrew in August.
“We’ve heard heartbreaking stories from families that have recently arrived in Iran,” Egeland said.
“One refugee said they were targeted for being (Shiite) Muslim, their few remaining possessions were taken, their house burned and they had to flee multiple times within Afghanistan before reaching Iran.”
The council said around $136 million of a $300 million appeal launched by the UN refugee agency to help up to 515,000 people who may flee Afghanistan before the end of the year was earmarked for Iran.
It said so far the appeal was only 32 percent funded.
“Now the international community must step up to support Afghanistan’s neighbors and share the responsibility to help them to continue welcoming refugees,” Egeland said.
Aid group: Up to 5,000 Afghan refugees a day entering Iran
https://arab.news/by9ru
Aid group: Up to 5,000 Afghan refugees a day entering Iran
- ‘We have heard heartbreaking stories from families that have recently arrived in Iran’
- At least 300,000 Afghans had crossed into Iran since the Taliban entered Kabul
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
