Last updated on October 17th, 2026 at 09:07 am
A border looks harmless on a map: a thin line between two colours. On the ground, some of those lines are guarded by soldiers, mined, fenced, fought over, or crossed every night by people with nowhere else to go. Growing up in Bangladesh, I learned early that a border can be a place where ordinary people die for carrying a sack of goods or walking the wrong path home.
Here are eleven international borders where danger is part of daily life, counted down from eleven to one. My ranking is a personal judgement based on conflict, militarisation and the human cost, and wherever I cite figures I link to the reporting behind them.
Table of Contents
11. Iran and Iraq
The Iran-Iraq frontier runs from the Shatt al-Arab waterway up to the Turkish border. Arguments over the river helped trigger the war that began in 1980 and lasted eight brutal years. The guns eventually fell silent, but the border never became a calm place.
Today the people most at risk are the kolbars, Kurdish couriers who carry goods such as tea, clothing, electronics and tyres across the mountains on their backs. Human Rights Watch has documented Iranian security forces shooting at these couriers, and couriers losing limbs to landmines. Citing the Kurdistan Press Agency (Kurdpa), the report counts dozens killed and hundreds injured in a single year, with security forces blamed for most of the casualties. One courier, 29-year-old Arkar Balveseh, was shot dead by Iranian guards.
10. Pakistan and Afghanistan
The Durand Line stretches roughly 2,600 kilometres through some of the most rugged terrain in Asia. Afghanistan has never formally accepted it as an international border, and governments in Kabul, including the Taliban, have kept that dispute alive.
Pakistan has fenced long stretches to stop militants moving across. The danger comes from weak state control on both sides: armed groups, smuggling, kidnapping and sudden exchanges of fire. Disputes over crossings such as Torkham have repeatedly turned into shootouts, and civilians in the border districts pay the heaviest price when the two armies trade fire.
9. China and North Korea
The China-North Korea border follows the Yalu and Tumen rivers and crosses the slopes of Mount Paektu. It is the main escape route for North Koreans fleeing hunger and repression, which makes it dangerous for anyone caught crossing. Both countries have added fences and surveillance over the years.
A Reuters correspondent who drove along the frontier in 2018 described a contrast between the two riverbanks unlike anything else in the world, a difference in living standards you can see with your own eyes from the Chinese side.
8. Colombia and Ecuador
For decades the Colombia-Ecuador border was shaped by the FARC rebel group and the drug trade that financed armed groups. Colombian forces at times struck rebel camps on Ecuadorian soil, which caused a serious diplomatic rupture between the two governments.
Even after Colombia’s peace process, the area stayed lawless. The Guardian reported on the 2018 kidnapping and murder of journalists in the Mataje area, and openDemocracy has described a neglected frontier where trafficking networks and dissident armed groups fill the gap left by the state. Indigenous communities have been pushed off their land in the process.
7. Niger and Chad
The Lake Chad basin is Boko Haram country. Around 2015 Chad sent troops into Niger to fight the insurgents around the border town of Bosso, and the two countries began joint operations. Attacks, kidnappings and displacement have made the area one of the most unstable in the Sahel, and tens of thousands of people have fled their homes.
6. Yemen and Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia built a barrier along its long southern frontier to stop weapons smuggling and irregular migration, and Yemen objected that it cut across traditional grazing land. Since the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen’s war began in 2015, the border has also been a front line.
The most disturbing reporting concerns migrants. In 2023 Human Rights Watch published a 73-page report accusing Saudi border guards of killing hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers between March 2022 and June 2023, using explosive weapons and close-range shooting. HRW based its findings on interviews and hundreds of videos, photographs and satellite images, and said that if the killings were government policy they could amount to crimes against humanity. The International Organization for Migration has also warned about stranded migrants dying at this border. Saudi Arabia has rejected the accusations.
5. Bangladesh and India
This is the one I know best. Bangladesh and India share a 4,096-kilometre border, among the longest land borders anywhere, and until 2015 it was full of enclaves, pockets of one country stranded inside the other. Smuggling runs in one direction and undocumented migration in the other.
What makes it deadly is the use of lethal force by India’s Border Security Force (BSF). The rights group Odhikar, as reported by New Age, counted at least 1,236 Bangladeshis killed by the BSF between 2000 and 2020. The legal aid organisation Ain o Salish Kendra has continued to record killings since then. Even members of the Border Guard Bangladesh have died, including Sepoy Mohammad Roisuddin, shot along the Jashore border in 2023.
The BSF usually says its men fire in self-defence against smugglers. Families and rights groups dispute that and describe torture, abductions and the killing of people who were simply farming or crossing to visit relatives. Both governments have repeatedly pledged to bring border deaths down to zero, and as The Daily Star put it in its headline, that pledge rings hollow.
4. Mexico and the United States
The US-Mexico border runs for nearly 2,000 miles from California to Texas, through busy cities and empty desert. Heavy enforcement around urban crossings has pushed many migrants into remote terrain, where heat and thirst kill people every year. US Customs and Border Protection data put the number of migrant deaths along the border at around 8,000 between 1998 and 2020.
Violence comes from both sides of the law. Cartels move drugs, weapons and people through regions such as Ciudad Juárez, and the Southern Border Communities Coalition has tracked well over a hundred deaths involving US Border Patrol agents since 2010.
3. Israel and Syria
The line between Israel and Syria has been contested since the colonial powers drew it after the First World War. The Golan Heights, which Israel captured in 1967, remain the core of the dispute, and the two countries have fought over this ground more than once. Syria’s civil war, which began in 2011, brought militias, air strikes and fresh instability right up to the frontier.
2. India and Pakistan
The India-Pakistan border was born in the bloodshed of Partition in 1947, and the two countries have since fought several wars, most of them over Kashmir. Parts of the frontier are so brightly floodlit that astronauts have photographed them at night from orbit.
Along the Line of Control in Kashmir, civilians are caught in the crossfire. In September 2023 Pakistan accused Indian troops of killing an elderly civilian in the Nikial sector, and earlier that year two civilians were killed in a similar incident, which India said involved people crossing illegally. Fighting between Indian forces and militants also continues, as in the 2024 ambush in Kathua that killed four Indian soldiers.
Since the insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir began in 1989, tens of thousands of civilians, militants and soldiers have died. India accuses Pakistan of backing armed groups, and Pakistan says it offers only diplomatic and moral support. Few disputes on earth have proven so resistant to a solution, and the 2019 border skirmishes showed how quickly it can bring two nuclear powers to the brink.
1. North Korea and South Korea
At the top of my list is the Korean Demilitarized Zone, a strip about 250 kilometres long and four kilometres wide, lined with fences, guard posts and landmines. The 1953 armistice stopped the Korean War but never ended it, and the two states still do not recognise each other.
The record of violence since then is long. North Korea seized the US Navy ship Pueblo in 1968, capturing its 83 crew members, one of whom died. Six South Korean sailors were killed in a naval clash near Yeonpyeong in 2002. In March 2010 the South Korean corvette Cheonan sank after an explosion that an international investigation blamed on a North Korean torpedo, killing 46 sailors. That November, North Korean artillery hit Yeonpyeong Island and killed two marines and two civilians.
Provocations continue. Shots have been fired at guard posts, and in December 2022 five North Korean drones crossed into the South, and a South Korean aircraft crashed during the response. Of all the borders on this list, the DMZ is the one where a single incident could start a full war.
What These Borders Have in Common
Looking at the eleven together, I notice a pattern. The people who die are rarely soldiers in uniform. They are couriers carrying tea on their backs, farmers near a fence, migrants walking through a desert, children in a border village. A border is a political idea, but its cost is paid in very ordinary lives.
