Abdul Majid, 12, sits crying quietly in a corner of the Ansar refugee camp in Herat province. He is alone in Afghanistan; his parents and seven siblings are all back in the Iran.
He said he was out with some friends in a park near his home in Semnan province one evening when he was detained.
“The police beat me up,” he said. “They asked me whether I was involved in violent groups. I swore I wasn’t connected with any. They finally deported me after eight days, and sent me to Afghanistan.”
Weeping bitterly, Abdul Majid said he did not know anyone in Afghanistan.
“I dream every night that my parents and brothers and sisters are looking for me. I wake up every morning crying,” he said.
Abdul Majid is one of hundreds of Afghan refugee children deported from Iran and taken from the Islam Qala crossing to camps such as Ansar, funded by the International Organisation for Migration, IOM, and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR.
Some of these children have never been to Afghanistan before and appear to have been removed from Iran without their parents’ knowledge.
Observers from the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, AIHRC, and the UN children’s agency UNICEF wait at the Islam Qala border point every day to register deported children as they come across and monitor where they are sent. AIHRC says it has interviewed and registered more than 2,000 su… >>>
