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Habibullah set off from his home in western Afghanistan determined to find work in Iran, only for the 15-year-old to freeze to death while walking across the mountainous frontier.”He was forced to go, to bring food for the family,” his mother, Mah Jan, told AFP at her mud home in Ghunjan village.”We have no food to eat, we have no clothes to wear. The house in which I live has no electricity, no water. I have no proper window, nothing to burn for heating,” she added, clutching a photo of her son.Habibullah was one of at least 18 migrants who died last month while trying to cross illegally into Iran from Afghanistan’s Herat province, according to officials, when temperatures were around -3C.With earthquakes and drought compounding a daily struggle to survive in Afghanistan, around half the population will need humanitarian assistance this year, according to the United Nations.”There was no other way left for me. I thought, let him go to make our life better,” said Mah Jan, 50, who requested the family’s surname not be published for privacy reasons.Habibullah’s stepbrother, Gul Ahmad, said the teenager had tried shoe polishing but only earned up to 15 afghanis (23 cents) per day.”He was ready to be a shepherd for 2,000 afghanis ($30 a month), to work in a shop, but he found nothing. So he was forced to leave. He told his mother, ‘Let’s trust in God, I’m going to Iran’,” said Gul Ahmad, 56.- ‘Very dangerous’ –  Habibullah was among 15 bodies returned from Iran, an Afghan border source told AFP on condition of anonymity.A further three migrants who died were recovered on the Afghan side of the frontier, an army official said.Over just a matter of days last month, around 1,600 Afghan migrants “who were at risk of perishing due to the weather” were rescued in the mountains, according to Iranian border guard commander Majid Shoja, quoted by the ILNA news agency.They are drawn to Iran due to greater job opportunities and a common language, but legal routes are limited.Afghanistan’s deputy minister for labour and social affairs, Abdul Manan Omari, said Sunday it was “necessary to do more” to facilitate work permits for migrants.Iran and Pakistan have combined sent back five million Afghans since September 2023, increasing the country’s population by 10 percent, according to the International Organization for Migration.The agency’s deputy head in Afghanistan, Mutya Izora Maskun, said that many in the country report “the economy, job insecurity, food insecurity, constrained access to services” force them to leave.They do so even if that means going through “illegal crossing points that are very dangerous due to the cold and the risks of human trafficking”, she told AFP.The Taliban government has taken “serious steps to fight the smugglers”, interior ministry spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani told AFP.But attempts to reach Iran have not stopped.- ‘Destitute’ -In the last week of December, “347 people who were trying to illegally cross the border into Iran were identified and arrested”, a military unit in western Afghanistan said in a statement on Saturday.Abdul Majeed Haidari, whose one-year-old son suffers from a heart problem, tried his luck in mid-December.Working at a brick oven, the 25-year-old could no longer afford to pay for his son’s medication and family expenses.”We left because we were so destitute,” his stepbrother Yunus, who accompanied him, told AFP.”We set out in the rain. In such weather, the radars and cameras of the border guards do not work properly. But the smuggler got lost,” he said.They failed to light a fire for warmth and, as snow fell, Yunus recounted his stepbrother’s words: “I can’t walk anymore.””Some told us to leave him so as not to endanger the other 19 people in the group,” said Yunus, who requested his full name not be used.After carrying him for two more hours, “his eyes stopped closing, his body grew heavier,” Yunus recalled, before an Iranian family drove past and took them to hospital.”They gave him electric shocks, but they said he was already dead,” said Yunus, who has since returned to his village.

New deadly clashes between protesters and security forces erupted in Iran, rights groups and local media said Sunday, as demonstrations first sparked by anger over the rising cost of living entered a second week. At least 12 people, including members of the security forces, have been killed since the protests kicked off with a shopkeepers’ strike in Tehran on December 28, according to a toll based on official reports.Overnight, protests featuring slogans criticising the Islamic republic’s clerical authorities were reported in Tehran, Shiraz in the south, and in areas of western Iran where the movement has been concentrated, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) monitor.The demonstrations are the most significant in Iran since a 2022-2023 movement sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code for women.The latest protests have been concentrated in parts of the west with large populations of the Kurdish and Lor minorities, and have yet to reach the scale of the 2022-2023 movement, let alone the mass street demonstrations that followed disputed 2009 presidential elections.But they do present a new challenge for supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — 86, and in power since 1989 — coming on the heels of a 12-day war with Israel in June that saw nuclear infrastructure damaged and key members of the security elite killed.With the government under pressure to show a response to the economic pain, spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani told state TV on Sunday that citizens would receive a monthly allowance equivalent to $7 for the next four months.President Donald Trump warned Sunday that Iran would get “hit very hard” by the United States if more protesters die.”We’re watching it very closely. If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One — a day after the American operation to capture Tehran’s ally Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.- Deadly clashes -The protests have taken place in 23 out of Iran’s 31 provinces and affected, to varying degrees, at least 40 different cities, most of them small and medium-sized, according to an AFP tally based on official announcements and media reports.The Norway-based Hengaw rights group said that Revolutionary Guards opened fire on protesters in the Malekshahi county of the western Ilam province on Saturday, killing four members of Iran’s Kurdish minority.The group said it was checking reports that two other people had been killed, adding dozens more were wounded. It also accused the authorities of raiding the main hospital in the city of Ilam to seize the bodies of the protesters.The Iran Human Rights NGO, also based in Norway, gave an identical toll of four dead, as well as 30 wounded, after “security forces attacked the protests” in Malekshahi.It said funerals for the dead took place on Sunday with mourners chanting slogans against the government and Khamenei.Both organisations posted footage of what appeared to be bloodied corpses on the ground, in videos verified by AFP.Iranian media said a member of the security forces was killed in a clash with “rioters” who attempted to storm a police office, with “two assailants” killed.In Tehran, sporadic demonstrations on Saturday night were reported in districts in the east, west and south, the Fars news agency said.- Hundreds detained -On Sunday, the vast majority of shops were open in the capital, although the streets appeared less crowded than usual, with riot police and security forces deployed at major intersections, AFP observed. Images verified by AFP showed Iranian security forces using tear gas to disperse a group of protesters who gathered in central Tehran during the day on Sunday.HRANA said that over the last week at least 582 people have been arrested. Hengaw said almost all of those killed were from ethnic minorities, chiefly Kurds and Lors.Abroad, several hundred people took part in two separate rallies in Paris on Sunday to support the protesters, following similar actions in London a day earlier, AFP correspondents said.