Turkish Minister of Interior Süleyman Soylu said Turkey had decided to build a 144-km long wall on its eastern border with Iran, news site Duvar reported .
Soylu told a meeting on security and drugs that Turkey had an illegal immigration problem due to the lack of effective state authorities in some of its neighbours, referring to Syria and Iraq.
But Soylu said there had also been a recent influx of migrants from Iran and that authorities this year had captured 27,000 people entering Turkey illegally, and 6,500 had been sent back to their home countries in 10 days.
“As the government, we have decided to make a wall in Ağrı and Iğdır,” he said referring to two Turkish provinces bordering Iran. “Approximately 2.5 million Afghans are waiting on the Iranian border. We are at the point of finishing 95 percent of our border walls in Iğdır. The irregular migration rate in Iğdır decreased by 90 percent.”
Soylu also said Turkey had ongoing projects as part of integrated border management scheme, including the establishment of a contact centre between Turkey, Bulgaria, and Greece for customs cooperation and improvements in surveillance capacity on both the western and eastern borders.
The border between Turkey and Iran is one of the oldest in the world and has stayed more or less the same since the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, and the Treaty of Zuhab in 1639.