Refugees are already trickling across the frontier, but as fast as they arrive, Iran tries to push them back again.
U.S. and British forces started attacking training camps of Saudi-born Osama bin Laden and installations of the hardline Taliban government that has protected the main suspect for last month’s suicide-hijack assaults on New York and Washington.
The United Nations says more than 400,000 Afghans could flee to Iran, which is determined to prevent them joining the more than two million Afghan refugees already in the country.
This desolate plateau where the borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan meet, is part of a 900-km (560-mile) long frontier where Tehran it says it will hold back any refugee tide.
A truck with 15 Afghans swaying on the back wound its way down the road to the provincial capital Zahedan on Sunday escorted by police armed with assault rifles.
“We are asking the Iranian nation and government to let us cross the border,” said one Afghan, 25-year-old Fayzollah.
Like the others he is an ethnic Tajik from the Panjsher valley, the main stronghold of the opposition Northern Alliance. Tajiks speak a dialect close to the Persian spoken in Iran.
“If we go back, the Taliban will kill us,” Fayzollah said as the truck stopped while police guards questioned reporters.
Security is always tight along the porous frontier to guard against heavily armed drug traffickers who make nightly forays into Iran.—AFP