Iranians grapple with whether to flee the country because of the war

Kapikoy Border Crossing, Turkey — After bombs exploded near her home in the eastern Iranian city of Golestan, hairdresser Merve Pourkaz decided to leave.

Pourkaz, 32, said he had traveled nearly 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) to cross the Alpine border in hopes of reaching the safety of the nearby Turkish city of Van.

“If they let me, I’ll stay in the van until the war is over,” he told The Associated Press recently while waiting at a crossing. “If the war doesn’t end, maybe I’ll go back and die.”

Pourkaz is one of 3.2 million people in Iran who the UN refugee agency estimates have been displaced since the start of the US-Israeli war with Iran. While some are seeking refuge in safer parts of Iran or its neighboring countries, others are returning from abroad, heading towards the fighting to protect their families and homes.

So far, relatively few people have chosen to leave: According to UN estimates, about 1,300 Iranians have fled through Turkey every day since the war began, and on some days, more people return to Iran than leave. But Iran’s neighbors and Europe are increasingly concerned about the potential migrant crisis the war could drag on and are making contingency plans.

As Pourcaz entered Turkey, Leila Rabetnezadfard took a different route.

Rabetnezadfard, 45, was preparing to marry a German university professor in Istanbul. He postponed the ceremony and went home to Shiraz in southern Iran.

“How can I be safe in Istanbul when my family lives in Iran during the war?” Rabetnejadfard said bringing her family to Istanbul was not an option because her apartment was small, her brother needed medical care and life there was expensive.

“I will not leave Iran until the war is over,” he said.

The UN has warned that continued fighting will push more Iranians to flee their homes.

Like last year’s 12-day conflict, without money to flee or perhaps US President Donald Trump’s Feb. Many Iranians are now sheltering in place due to the 28th warning.

“Stay in shelter. Don’t leave your house. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs are falling everywhere,” he said.

Although large numbers of Iranians have not yet fled the country, people are leaving major cities for the relative safety of the countryside bordering the Caspian Sea north of the capital Tehran, according to the International Organization for Migration.

“Emigration from Iran is limited as people prefer to stay with their families and the safety of their families and property, and due to security conditions and logistical constraints,” said Salvador Gutierrez, IOM’s head of mission in Iran.

If Iran’s critical infrastructure is destroyed, it could lead to waves of people trying to cross into one of Iran’s neighbors: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey and Iraq.

“If there is no water in Tehran, a city of 10 million people, they will go somewhere,” said Alex Vatanka, a fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Iran is already grappling with the world’s largest refugee population: approximately 2.5 million people have been forcibly displaced, mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq.

If the crisis escalates, aid groups say the most likely places for refugees will be Iran’s borders with Iraq and Turkey, which stretch some 2,200 kilometers (1,367 miles) through rugged alpine terrain and are home to many Kurdish communities and difficult to police.

Turkey has a so-called open-door policy that allowed millions of Syrian refugees to enter the country during their country’s long civil war. But due to some reasons that method has been abandoned.

Instead, Iran has drawn up plans to shelter refugees in “buffer zones” along the border, or in tent cities, or in temporary housing inside Turkey, the country’s Hurriyet newspaper quoted Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Cifti as saying.

Iranians who fled the war do not seek refugee status in Turkey because asylum claims can take years to process, said Sara Karakoyun, an aid worker at the Independent Human Resources Development Foundation near the border.

“They don’t want to wait in limbo for years for refugee status that they don’t get,” he said.

The Turkish Defense Ministry said in January that Turkey had strengthened its border with Iran by adding 380 kilometers of concrete walls, 203 optical towers and 43 observation posts.

Turkey will send troops to secure its borders and tightly control the flow of people into the country while the European Union seeks funds to help deal with refugees, said Ricardo Gasco, an analyst at the Istanbul Institute.

The relationship between the EU and Turkey has been redefined since the Syrian refugee crisis a decade ago. About two-thirds of the 4.5 million Syrians fleeing the civil war ended up in Turkey. Many later traveled to Europe in small boats.

In 2016, Brussels and Ankara struck a migration deal where the EU offered Turkey incentives and 6 billion euros ($7.1 billion) in aid to Syrian refugees on its territory to persuade Ankara to stop tens of thousands of migrants leaving for Greece.

Aid groups say the deal has created open-air prisons with squalid conditions. But for the EU leadership, the deal saved people, kept many migrants from reaching EU territory and made life better for refugees in Turkey.

A renewal of that deal is due this year, but Turkish citizens have soured on Syrian refugees and anti-immigrant right-wing parties have grown in popularity in parts of Europe.

And another refugee crisis is already close to Europe, with fighting in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah that has displaced more than 800,000 people so far.

“We’ve got a situation (in the Middle East) with serious humanitarian consequences at a time when humanitarian funding has been cut completely,” said Ninette Kelly, head of Refugees World. & Immigration Council, Trump administration suggests ousting USAID. “Is the world ready for another humanitarian disaster?”

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McNeill reports from Brussels. Associated Press writers Suzanne Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, Faye Abulgassim in Cairo and Qasim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad contributed to this report.