BBC probe alleges Turkish border guards beat Afghan migrants at Iran frontier

Afghan migrants trying to reach Europe said Turkish border forces stripped them, tied their hands and abandoned them in sub-zero snow near Van, leaving 11 people with amputations and at least 20 dead. Twelve young Afghans interviewed in the account said they were among a group of 50 migrants beaten, robbed and left close to the Iranian border.

The injuries were described as the result of a winter crossing in eastern Turkey, where temperatures fell below freezing and the men were left stranded in the snow near the frontier with Iran. The accounts place the violence near Van, a city that sits on one of the most heavily policed stretches of the Iran-Turkey border, where migrants moving along irregular routes often try to slip through on foot.

The allegations land inside a wider pattern that has shadowed Turkey’s treatment of Afghan asylum seekers. Human Rights Watch said in November 2022 that Turkey was routinely pushing tens of thousands of Afghans back at its land border with Iran or deporting them directly to Afghanistan, often with little or no examination of their claims for international protection. The group said it interviewed 68 Afghans, 38 of whom described 114 pushback incidents between January 2021 and April 2022.

Human Rights Watch also said Turkey stepped up pushbacks and deportations after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021. That matters because Turkey hosts the world’s largest refugee population, including hundreds of thousands of Afghans, and its border policy has become a test of how far deterrence can go before it turns deadly on the ground.

The Iran-Turkey route has also carried its own criminal violence. BBC reporting in 2023 found Afghan migrants on the same border were being kidnapped and tortured by gangs, who sent video evidence to families and demanded ransom. For Afghans fleeing Taliban rule, the journey through Iran and eastern Turkey has exposed them to both organized abuse and state force, with winter conditions magnifying the toll of each pushback.