KABUL: Abdulsaboor Seddiqi was in the middle of his mid-term exams at a university in Tehran when Israeli bombardment started to wreak havoc in the city. He decided to leave as soon as classes were suspended, and traveled 1,200 km to cross to Afghanistan.
Israeli airstrikes on Iran began last week, when Tel Aviv hit more than a dozen Iranian sites — including key nuclear facilities and the residences of military leaders and scientists — claiming it was aiming to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
Daily attacks have been ongoing for the past seven days after Iran retaliated with ballistic missile strikes against Israel. The Israeli military has since been increasingly targeting civilian infrastructure.
“During the last week, we didn’t have proper phone and internet connectivity. Power cuts were more frequent,” Seddiqi, a computer science student, told Arab News.
“My family back in Herat was worried for my safety. I decided to leave.”
He is one of the thousands of Afghans who are now crossing the border every day.
At the Islam Qala crossing alone — part of the main route connecting Herat and Iran’s Mashhad — the number of people crossing daily has surged from 1,500 to as high as 8,000.
“The number of Afghans returning from Iran has drastically increased during the last week. The majority of the returnees were individuals prior to the conflict, while a lot of families also returned in the last week,” said Naser Azimi, a health worker at the Islam Qala health center.
“The number of Afghans returning through Islam Qala every day increased to 3,000 and even reached 8,000 people in a day.”
Abdulbasit Qazizada, who has been working in Tehran for the past two years, arrived in Herat on Monday.
“There was an unusual rush at the Islam Qala border crossing when I was coming back,” he said. “There’s so much fear and anxiety across all cities of Iran, especially Tehran. Many Afghans also work or live there.”
Over decades of armed conflict at home, about 5 million Afghan refugees and migrant workers settled in neighboring Iran, according to official data. Iran is home to the largest Afghan diaspora in the world. Most of them live in Tehran.
Some Afghan families have lost contact with their relatives living in the Iranian capital since the outbreak of violence.
“My brother went to Iran a few months ago for work. We heard in the news on Friday that Israel attacked Iran and killed a lot of people,” said Mohammad Naser, a resident of Kabul, whose brother and two cousins were in Tehran.
“It’s been a week that we don’t know anything about them. My mother and my family members are very concerned. We don’t know if they are OK. We feel helpless because we can’t do anything.”
According to the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education, at least 224 people have been killed and 1,481 wounded in Israeli attacks. Various media outlets have reported, however, that casualty numbers could be at least twice as high.
