Khorasan Province

Khorasan or Khorasan (also spelled Khorasan, Persian خراسان Khorasan) was the name of a former Iranian province with the provincial capital Mashhad, which was divided into North, South and Razavi Khorasan in 2004 (further parts were integrated into the provinces of Yazd and Sistan and Baluchistan). The provinces are located on the border with Turkmenistan as well as Afghanistan and correspond to the southwestern part of the greater Khorasan region.

The population of Khorasan is about 6 million, the vast majority of them Shiite Muslims of Persian descent. In addition, at least 400,000 so-called Khorasan Turks live in Khorasan, including the Afshars, as well as a small but significant Kurdish minority. In the 17th century, the Persian Shah Abbas I had resettled 10,000 Shiite Kurds in Khorasan to form a bulwark against the increasingly strong Turkmen invasions. This outer province was also considered, among other things, a place of exile or retreat.

Due to the open and difficult-to-understand border with Afghanistan, the number of Afghan citizens and refugees in this province is almost impossible to ascertain. It was assumed that during the civil war 1980-1989 about 2 million Afghans fled to Iran. Today, the official number of non-naturalized Afghan refugees is about 800,000, but the number is likely to be over 1 million. The Afghans living in the three provinces are mostly of Persian origin and Shiite. They come, for example, from the provinces of Herat, Farah (western Afghanistan), Bamiyan or Nimrus.

Many Persian Shiite or Shiite-only Afghans, especially from the border areas, have had active family and other ties with Iran. These aspects are forgotten. People think that people from Afghanistan have only been in Iran since the outbreak of the war against the Soviets and the later civil war - which is not true. There were already active contacts with Iran before 1980. Thus, many people from Afghanistan came to Iran as seasonal workers, pilgrims (Imam Reza), traders, students (whether religious or secular study goals) or as tourists.