Settlement of Refugee Crisis Hinges on Eradication of Terrorism: Iran’s UN Envoy

In an address to the Monday session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Khoshroo said it is crucial to recognize that refugees and asylum-seekers are symptoms of a crisis and not the problem themselves. 

The refugees in the Mediterranean are fleeing the horror of war, conflict and violence at home, the Iranian envoy said.

He further stressed that there should be “no doubt” that if the international community fails to deal effectively with extremist groups and eradicate them, the refugee crisis would only get worse.

Khoshroo said that there is now a near consensus that foreign military intervention in several countries in the Middle East has contributed largely to the awakening of extremist ideology.

Those who ignored and violated international law should come to terms that they were among the culprits to the critical situation at hand, he added.

Many developing countries have hosted and supported millions of refugees by the means of their own scarce resources and mostly unnoticed by the world, Khoshroo went on to say.

Iran hosted more than a million refugees with minimal or no international support, he said, urging further assistance from the global community in this regard.

In recent months, many countries, particularly in Europe, have been beset by an enormous refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants fleeing to Europe to escape war in their home countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

According to the EU border agency Frontex's latest estimates, the number of migrants who have crossed the bloc’s external frontiers in the first nine months of 2015 has exceeded 710,000.