Iran has said that eighteen-thousand Iraqi refugees have returned home in the past few months.

A senior official in Teheran, Hassan-Ali Ebrahimi, said most of the refugees who had returned to Iraq were Iraqi Kurds, but there were also about two-thousand Shi'ites.

He described this as a desirable trend, saying it had begun after Iraq said in June that it was granting amnesty to people who had left the country illegally.

The Iranian official also said some forty-thousand Afghan refugees had returned voluntarily to their homeland since March. Iran is host to more than one-million Afghan refugees and half-a-million Iraqi refugees.