The Border Landscape in Eastern Turkey After the Taliban’s Takeover of Afghanistan

Executive Summary

2020/21 Mercator-IPC Researcher Karolína Augustová's analysis titled "The Border Landscape in Eastern Turkey After the Taliban’s Takeover of Afghanistan" was published in September 2021.

Introduction 

In July 2021, Jansher1 and his family decided to flee Afghanistan amid the growing threat posed by the Taliban, which has killed many people like Jansher himself: a Shi’a Muslim and an ethnic Hazara. When leaving Afghanistan Jansher and his family took with them a small boy whose parents had been murdered by Taliban soldiers and had no one but his neighbors. A smuggler, to whom the family paid 8,000 euro in total, moved them to a flat in Iran and housed them there for a month to wait for the “right time” to move on. Then, another smuggler took them to the mountains between Iran and Turkey, only pointing in the direction in which the whole family should walk. After trekking across mountains in extreme heat and struggling to stay in the right direction, the family arrived in front of a concrete wall, marking the entry to Turkey. “We were spotted by the Turkish Army. They were running toward us and then started beating all men. But they did not touch women and children. They took our phones and shouted at us to go back to Iran and never come back to Turkey,” recounted Jansher, adding that his family had been pushed back to Iran two times before. After several weeks stranded in the mountains with his whole family, Jansher’s luck finally turned. “We found the end of the wall that was not yet completed. We snaked under the wall construction in progress with the help of a rope made out of our clothes and eventually arrived in Van without being detected,” he said while watching his small daughter sleeping on his wife’s lap in a flat with no furniture and only two mattresses.

Final Remarks 

The Afghans I talked to in Eastern Turkey carry with them stories of the Taliban killing their friends and relatives, forced disappearances, and forced marriages of girls who were taken from their families, as well as worries about their and their children’s future in terms of education (especially girls) and access to work in Afghanistan. Yet, as indicated in this analysis, Afghans continue to navigate more struggles and violence en route to Turkey. Afghan families in Van also talked about their friends and relatives who recently wished to leave Afghanistan but could not do so due to the Taliban’s control of internal borders as well as the Iranian Army pushing people back to Afghanistan.