Already hosting largest refugee population, Turkey facing influx of Afghans

ANKARA: Turkey already hosts the world’s largest refugee population, including three million Syrians, but over the last year there has been an influx of Afghans seeking a safe haven — and not just from Afghanistan itself, but from Iran.
For decades Iran, to Turkey’s east, has been home to some three million Afghans who have fled the endless war pitting the Taliban and other rebels against the western-backed government in Kabul.
Many live in miserable conditions and their prospects have become even more precarious due to the Islamic Republic’s increasingly troubled economy.
Turkey is home to 145,000 Afghans, according to Amnesty International figures released in April, but the influx has really taken off this year.
Up to mid-August, 61,819 Afghan migrants had arrived in Turkey this year compared to 45,259 in 2017, according to Turkish interior ministry figures.
Javad Saadatnejad was a refugee in Iran for 34 years before arriving in Turkey last month. “Iran didn’t do anything for me,” he said.
Those who seek asylum in Turkey are called “conditional refugees”. Izza Leg­htas, senior advocate for Europe at Refugees Interna­tional, said this gives “the idea that really they’re only in Turkey temporarily until they go and resettle” elsewhere.
But resettlement figures to the US have gone down “drastically” in the last 18 months, Leghtas said.
In 2017, US President Donald Trump cut the number of refugees that Washington would accept to 45,000 from 110,000 in the last year under Barack Obama.
The new arrivals find they have to make the best of limited or even no facilities.
Mohammad Hussein, from northern Kunduz province, said his six children aged between two and 15 slept in an Ankara park for a week in “uncomfortable” circumstances in front of the Association for Solidarity with Asylum-Seekers and Migrants (ASAM) building.
ASAM works together with the UN and the Turkish Provincial Directorate of Migration Management to register refugees.
Hussein, 35, said he fled the Taliban because he had helped Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) find the group’s weapons.
Fearing reprisals since “the Taliban knew” about his work, Hussein fled, walking across the Turkish border with his wife and children aged two, four, six, nine, 13 and 15.
But he said he could not stay in Turkey where he is “in danger”, saying he wanted to go somewhere like Switzerland or Canada.
Afghanistan ranked second globally as the largest source of refugees in 2017, with 2.6m compared to 6.3m Syrians concentrated in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Kashmir Monitor staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)