Iranian Travellers Stranded as Flight Suspensions Push Them Towards Land Borders

 

By the Editorial Team of TLF

Iranian travellers are giving up on planes and heading for the border. Shargh Daily reports queues stretching out at crossings in the country's north-west and beyond, filled with students trying to get back to universities, patients chasing treatment abroad, older passengers, families split from relatives overseas. Nobody at the airports can tell them when a flight will actually leave.

Travel agents are fielding the same panicked calls, Shargh says, and giving the same non-answer: no idea which flights survive the week. No foreign carrier has touched Iranian airspace since the war. Meanwhile the list of countries turning away Iranian planes keeps growing.

Washington moved on 8 September. Thirty-six entities sanctioned, 27 of them Iranian airlines, according to Shargh's reporting. The fuel suppliers, insurers, ground handlers, ticket agents, baggage crews — anyone servicing those carriers now carries exposure to US penalties themselves. Britain follows on 29 September, barring Iranian cargo aircraft with a handful of exceptions.

Turkey. Oman. Georgia. Iraq. Azerbaijan. Shargh names all five as having restricted or halted Iranian flights outright. Azerbaijan Airlines confirmed it would suspend Iranian carrier flights into the country starting 22 September. In Iraq, the aviation authority's spokesman Majid Akhavan told IRNA that Baghdad airport had simply stopped taking flights out of Iran — a call made by the airport's British operator, he stressed, not Iraqi government policy. Najaf still takes them.

So people drive instead. Shargh describes the Razi crossing in Iran's north-west backed up with travellers pushing toward Van in Turkey, hoping to pick up an international flight from there. Similar backups are showing up at crossings into Iraq and Azerbaijan.

None of this is happening in isolation. Iran's own tourism ministry data, cited by Shargh, shows inbound visitors down 51.5 percent in the first three months of 1405 versus the same stretch a year before. Outbound traffic fell 34.24 percent over the same window — the sector was already bleeding before the sanctions hit.

Hormatollah Rafiei, who heads Iran's Association of Travel Agencies, called the aviation sanctions another heavy blow to a tourism industry already struggling. A few routes are still flying, he told Shargh. Just not with any certainty attached, and not with much room left on the plane.

Picture: AI generated