Iran says no plan to build wall with Afghanistan

TEHRAN, Iran

Iran has rejected reports about the construction of a wall on the border with Afghanistan, with the country’s interior minister saying no such plan is on the cards.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a Cabinet meeting in Tehran on Wednesday, Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi said there is no plan to build a wall but to barricade the border.

“There is no plan to build a wall. The issue of blocking the border is what we are pursuing,” he was quoted as saying by state-run news agency IRNA.

The two neighboring countries have a 582-mile-long border between them with two official border crossings. The border is mostly porous and is often used for illegal migration and drug trafficking.

Since the Taliban’s return to Kabul in 2021, tens of thousands of more Afghans have crossed into Iran, displaced by war in their home country, taking the overall number of Afghan refugees to 4 million.

In November last year, Iranian officials said at least 450,000 refugees, mostly from Afghanistan, without requisite legal documents had been repatriated since August of that year.

There have been frequent border skirmishes between the two sides since last year, exacerbated by the long-running dispute over shared water resources.

In May last year, Iranian border guards and Taliban soldiers engaged in fierce cross-border clashes, resulting in the death of three people, two on the Iranian side and one on the Afghan side.

There were also reports at the time about the Taliban moving military and heavy equipment along the border with Iran amid heightened tensions.

It came two months after fierce clashes were reported between Iranian border guards and Taliban forces in the city of Hirmand in Sistan-Baluchestan province.