‘More than 10 kilometres of wall have been built on the border and another 50 kilometres are planned,’ General Nuzar Nemati, deputy commander of the Iranian Ground Forces, told local media. Iran shares a 900-kilometre border with Afghanistan.

On 9 September, Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni announced the ‘complete’ closure of the borders, adding that the country ‘can no longer accept such a large number of Afghan migrants’.

The flow of Afghan migrants to Iran has increased since the Taliban seized power in Kabul in 2021.

According to the latest government figures published in August, the country is home to ‘more than 2.7 million legal Afghan refugees’, or ‘97 percent of all legal migrants’.

The government has not provided the total number of Afghan migrants on Iranian territory. However, Abulfazl Turabi, a member of parliament, recently estimated their number at ‘between six and seven million’. Others put the number of Afghan migrants at 8 million. Most of them work in the big cities for low wages, mostly in construction or in small businesses.

On 10 September, Ahmad-Reza Radan, commander of Iran's security forces, said that the authorities wanted to deport two million undocumented migrants by the end of March 2025.