The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated December 18 as International Migrants Day. The total number of refugees throughout the globe amounts to about 270 million, consisting of 3.6 percent of the world's population.
For years, Iran has been hosting a great number of refugees and migrants from Afghanistan and Iraq.
The first wave of migration of Iraqi nationals to Iran dates back to 1980 when Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime forced thousands of people of Iranian origin to leave the Arab country. This second wave of migration happened when the then-Iraqi regime started a crackdown on Shia movements in southern Iran.
When it comes to Afghanistan, there have been four rounds of mass migration of Afghan refugees to Iran in terms of historical developments.
The first wave of migration from Afghanistan to Iran happened in 1979 concurrent with the aggression of the Soviet Union on Afghanistan, the second one was amid the fall of the Afghan government in 1990, the third one was in 2001 when the US invaded Afghanistan, and the fourth wave happened as the result of the collapse of Ashraf Ghani’s government in August 2021.
Now the number of Afghan migrants and refugees in Iran amounts to more than five million people.
Ali Bahreini, the Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nation and other international organizations in Geneva, emphasized that over 700 thousand Afghan pupils and 58 thousand university students are studying at Iranian public schools and universities and that the Islamic Republic has provided the Afghan migrants with public health insurances and vaccinations.
It is worth mentioning that the Islamic Republic of Iran hosts millions of migrants and asylum-seekers, while the country is suffering from illegal and unilateral sanctions imposed by the US and its allies.
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