The Taliban Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation said that more than 7,000 Afghan refugees had been forcibly deported from Iran over the past week.
Calling for more aid, the Foreign Minister of Iran in a conversation with his New Zealand counterpart previously stated that the number of Afghan refugees in Iran totals 4.5 million.
The Iranian ambassador in Kabul, the Afghan capital also stated that as many as 6,000 Afghans enter Iran through the borders.
Before the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, 3.4 million refugees were living in Iran, of which roughly 2 million lacked the proper documentation to do so, according to information provided by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
International organizations have also reported that since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, both the number of people migrating to Iran and the number of people being forcibly deported from Iran have rocketed.
According to a Wall Street Journal article, the Iranian government deports between 2,500 and 4,000 Afghans per day, totaling millions of Afghans this year.
Approximately 500,000 Afghans were trafficked into Iran between August 2021, when the Taliban retook control of the country, and December 5 of that same year, according to UN statistics.
About 360,000 of them were forcibly expelled, facing mistreatment by the Iranian authorities, while 126,000 of them returned home as voluntarily.
Earlier in a statement, Amnesty International urged all countries to cease deporting Afghan migrants to Turkey or Iran, where they risk incarceration, torture, other ill-treatment, and refoulement to Afghanistan.
