MASHHAD, Khorasan Province A total of 170,905 Afghan refugees have been repatriated from Iran, 115,645 of them included in the voluntary repatriation program arranged with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UNHCR representative in this northeastern city said Tuesday.
Toshiro Odashima told IRNA the repatriated Afghans left their temporary camps in Tehran, Mashhad, Zahedan, Kerman, Isfahan, Kashan and Qom since the program took effect in April.
The UNHCR puts the total number of Afghans residing in Iran at 1.4 million.
Iranian authorities say there is an additional 700,000 illegal Afghan aliens in the country.
Under an agreement signed in February between the UNHCR and Iran, some 100,000 refugees are to return to Afghanistan over a period of six months.
It gave refugees without papers the choice of seeking asylum within six months or of opting for repatriation.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Sadako Ogata said last month in Tehran that the Iranian government had agreed to extend the repatriation program for Afghan refugees here by three months.
Meanwhile, the Head of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Mashhad Toshiro Odashima said yesterday that due to the cold weather and the advent of Ramazan the number of Afghan refugees in Iran to be expatriated has decreased.
Speaking to IRNA, Odashima said the number has been decreasing since four weeks ago and is mostly due to bad weather on the other side of the border and in Herat area in Afghanistan.
He said the beginning of rain and snow in the area, displacement of almost 47,000 Afghans in Herat and the bad condition of the roads are among the reasons for this.
Odashima said the destination of over 52 percent of Afghan refugees who are volunteers to return to their country is Herat area.
He said according to a request by Afghan officials, UNHCR has decreased the number of weekly convoys of the repatriated from three to one and the number of the expatriated from 2,100 to 1,000.
(IRNA)