The federal government admits that a third of the people who have been accepted into Germany have still not been taken out of the country – almost a year after the Taliban took power.
Almost 12,000 Afghans who have been accepted from Germany are still waiting to be flown out. This emerges from a response from the federal government to a request from the left-wing faction. According to this, 11,864 people were on the list of those who should still be taken out of Afghanistan or a neighboring country if they managed to escape there. That is about a third of those who have received a letter of acceptance from Germany since the Taliban took power last August.
Since August 2021, around 33,000 people from Afghanistan have been accepted, and around 21,000 of them have been brought to Germany since then. Among them are about 3,600 local workers with their families, a total of almost 16,800 people. Almost 1,300 people were also admitted with relatives who were considered particularly at risk after the Taliban took power because they campaigned for human rights, democracy and Western values.
By June 10, there had been around 1,000 evacuations within a month, said Clara Bünger, spokeswoman for refugee policy in the Bundestag, citing figures requested from the federal government at the time. Around 6,200 people were brought to Germany between the end of February and the beginning of May. The federal government’s pace of evacuations is slowing down.
Bünger said that in all probability one year after the Taliban took power, the federal government would not have implemented its promise to bring all Afghans who were particularly at risk to safety. She also criticized that there are still too many rejections for other people in Afghanistan who want to come to Germany. Bünger referred to a family that had made their homes available as shelters for vulnerable local workers last year. Since the hiding places had been blown, these people are now on the run themselves. But her applications for admission were rejected, she said.
The left-wing politician also criticized the fact that the Federal Ministry of the Interior has so far not given the green light for planned state reception programs. In its response to Bünger’s request, the ministry justified these decisions so far because decisions on the planned federal program to take in Afghans are still pending.