ANKARA

Iran said Wednesday it had deported around 18,000 irregular Afghan migrants to Afghanistan.

“Some 17,926 Afghan migrants were deported in the last 10 days,” police chief of the northeastern Khorasan-e-Razavi province, Majid Shoca, said in statements cited by the Mehr News Agency.

He said the Afghan migrants were repatriated through the Dogharoon border crossing.

According to Iranian Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi, there are more than five million Afghan refugees in Iran.

A vast majority of them, displaced by war in their home country, live in major Iranian cities like Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, Qom, and Kerman and work as manual laborers.

*Writing by Ikram Kouachi