LUSA 06/24/2025

Lusa - Business News - Guinea-Bissau: Nationals in Iran want Bissau to help them return home

Bissau, June 23, 2025 (Lusa) - The representative of the Guinea-Bissau Chamber of Commerce in Iran, Idrissa Ganó, said on Monday that some Guinea-Bissau citizens in the Persian state, mostly students, want to return to their country due to the war and are asking for support from the authorities.

In a telephone interview with the Lusa news agency from the Iranian city of Qom, Idrissa Ganó, a Guinea-Bissau national who studied international relations in Iran, said that “some Bissau-Guineans want to leave Iran” because “they fear that the war will intensify”.

The university professor of Portuguese, Arabic and discursive sciences described difficulties for people to travel, with roads closed after the United States entered the conflict on Sunday, which began on June 13 with Israeli attacks on Iran, bombing nuclear facilities in that Middle Eastern country.

Ganó stressed that he is not an official representative of Guinea-Bissau in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but said he is trying to help Guineans using his knowledge of the country and the Persian language.

According to Idrissa Ganó, the number of Guinea-Bissau citizens in Iran “does not exceed 50 people, including newborn children,” and most of them are students.

Those interested in returning to Guinea-Bissau are mostly students living in the city of Qom, 156 kilometres southeast of Tehran, said the representative of the Guinea-Bissau Chamber of Commerce.

Ganó himself lives and works in Qom, a city which, in addition to hosting a large number of foreigners, is also home to a uranium enrichment plant bombed by the United States on Sunday.

The Guinea-Bissau professor told Lusa that he had not heard the explosions in the area where he was on the day of the US attack, but that life in Qom had changed to such an extent that he was unable to travel to Tehran as he usually does.

“It is impossible to travel. Some roads are cut off,” said Ganó, who is asking the Guinea-Bissau authorities to provide support for citizens who want to leave Iran.

Idrissa Ganó noted that the embassies of African countries such as Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone are registering their citizens in Qom in order to get them out of the country as soon as possible.

In August 2010, the then President of Guinea-Bissau, Malam Bacai Sanhá, who has since died, made a state visit to Iran and years later the two countries established diplomatic relations, which resulted in the opening of aGuinea-Bissau embassy in Tehran.

In the interview with Lusa, Idrissa Ganó said, however, that the Guinea-Bissau embassy "closed its doors many years ago".

 

 

 

 

MB/AYLS // AYLS

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