Afghan refugees are not a security challenge: Iran

Iran’s interior minister has said that more than five million Afghan refugees who are currently residing in Iran are not a security challenge for Tehran.

“The security institutions have their own controls and supervision, but managing refugees needs more supervision, and we hope that the national refugees organization that we have proposed will be approved in the parliament because we need a stronger structure,” Ahamd Wahidi told ISNA news agency.

In response to the question of whether this number of Afghan refugees may pose a security challenge for Iran, Wahidi said: “No, of course there may be security problems in any community, but in general the intelligence agencies have not given us such a report. And if there is a report, it will be addressed and dealt with.”

In other news, Iranian authorities have announced that they have returned nearly 18,000 Afghan citizens to their country in the last 10 days.

The border guard commander of Iran’s Razavi Khorsan province said that this number of “illegal” immigrants were handed over to the Afghan authorities through the Dogharun border.

Meanwhile, Mohammad Mahdi Jawanmard Qasab, the adviser to the Iranian president’s special envoy on Afghanistan affairs, said that Afghans have invested about $150 million in Iran in the last four months, which is a very good figure compared to previous years.

In an interview with Bazaar media outlet, Jawanmard Qasab said that these investments were made in various sectors, including agriculture, industry and construction.