Status: 09.10.2022 08:36 a.m
Dozens of former local Bundeswehr personnel who were supposed to be evacuated from Afghanistan after the Taliban took power are now dead. The federal government confirmed this. Not all died a natural death.
The federal government has acknowledged that more than 30 former local workers and other vulnerable people who were to be evacuated from Afghanistan have now died. This emerges from the response of the federal government to a request from the left-wing member of the Bundestag Clara Bünger. This is available to the dpa news agency, previously the “Spiegel” had reported about it.
According to the report, the German government’s response lists the causes of the Afghans’ deaths. Accordingly, 15 people died of “natural causes or in an accident”. Nine people were violently killed: a local worker died in an IS attack on a mosque, and a family member of a particularly vulnerable person died in an attack in front of a passport authority. A relative of a local worker was killed because he was once a member of the Afghan armed forces. The cause of death was therefore unclear for seven people, and one local worker committed suicide.
More than 36,000 recordings promised
Overall, in the past 15 months, the federal government has promised more than 36,000 admissions for former local Afghan workers and other particularly endangered Afghans, each including their entitled family members. More than two-thirds of the people who had been accepted for Germany have now been able to leave Afghanistan – mostly via Pakistan.
The fact that the Taliban require a passport, which not all those affected have, proves to be problematic when the survivors leave the country.
Left MP Bünger speaks of “disaster”
The left-wing deputy Bünger calls the balance sheet in “Spiegel” a “disaster”. The old government had failed miserably in getting vulnerable people out of Afghanistan in time. “And the new government hasn’t even managed to secure at least those who have been accepted.”
The Bundeswehr withdrew from Afghanistan at the end of June 2021 after almost 20 years. The Taliban took power in the capital Kabul in mid-August 2021 without much resistance from the Afghan armed forces. Since July, a committee of inquiry of the Bundestag has also been dealing with the events at that time. It is also about the fate of the local forces who are still waiting to leave for Germany.