A passenger bus carrying Afghans recently returned from Iran crashed and caught fire in Herat province on August 19, 2025, killing 79 people, according to Afghan officials cited by BBC News. The dead included 17 children.
The bus was travelling from Islam Qala, a border town where returnees enter Afghanistan, toward Kabul when it collided with a truck and a motorcycle on Tuesday night. The route was intended to carry the passengers onward to the Afghan capital. Ahmadullah Mottaqi, the Taliban administration's information and culture director in Herat, said everyone aboard the bus was killed. Two people travelling in the other vehicles also died.
The collision occurred in western Afghanistan and the resulting fire consumed the passenger vehicle. Provincial governor spokesperson Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi said all of its passengers were migrants who had boarded at Islam Qala. Herat police attributed the crash to excessive speed and negligence by the bus driver, according to reporting relayed by the BBC. The evidence does not provide an independent technical determination of the cause.
The deaths came amid a large movement of Afghans out of Iran. More than 1.5 million Afghans had left Iran since the beginning of 2025, according to the UN Refugee Agency figure cited in the report. Iran had set a July deadline for undocumented Afghans to leave voluntarily and had accelerated forced returns after its conflict with Israel in June. Some of those returning had lived in Iran for generations.
Afghanistan was already receiving large numbers of people expelled from Pakistan as well. Aid groups warned that the combined arrivals were putting pressure on housing, services and livelihoods in a country whose resources had been weakened by reductions in international assistance. Save the Children country director Arshad Malik said the influx was adding strain to systems that were already stretched.
Road travel also carries persistent risks inside Afghanistan. Decades of conflict have damaged infrastructure, while traffic rules are often weakly enforced. Millions of Afghans have sought refuge in Iran and Pakistan since the 1970s, including major movements after the 1979 Soviet invasion and the Taliban return to power in 2021. Those broader conditions do not establish what happened in this specific collision, which local police linked to the driver's conduct.
The August 19 disaster joined a migration crisis to a severe transport tragedy: people who had just crossed back into Afghanistan died on the overland journey toward the capital. Officials' initial accounts established the number of victims and the vehicles involved, while the supplied evidence did not describe a later independent investigation or identify the passengers.
