It sounds like they’re describing different realities. First of all, Saifora Niazi, member of parliament for the northern Balkh province in the national parliament in Kabul: She thinks that the current situation cannot be compared with anything from previous years. In a telephone conversation, she lists numerous districts that fell into the hands of the Taliban in the former Bundeswehr deployment area of Balch. The Afghan MP also spoke about areas that had been recaptured by government forces and reported “heavy bombing, including civilian casualties”. And Niazi said of her hometown Mazar-i-Sharif: “The security situation in the city is alarming. The Taliban have reached the gates of the city, the people have shown courage, have stood by the security forces and drove them back.”
A representative of the Foreign Office also spoke in Berlin earlier this week about “the difficult situation” in Afghanistan. From the perspective of the Federal Government, however, the security situation there is “volatile”: It is not the case that “Mazar-e-Sharif is an enclosed city that no one can get in or out of. The Afghan army is in place fighting with the Taliban. It’s difficult. We are aware of that. “
On Wednesday evening, the SZ emailed the Foreign Office to inquire about this. For example, what exactly is meant by the term “volatile”, why the German consulate general in Mazar-i-Sharif no longer opened, whether the situation in the city was life-threatening from the perspective of the federal government. There was no response until Friday evening.
Last week, the last Bundeswehr soldiers withdrew from Mazar-i-Sharif, and after 20 years the West has ended its military mission in Afghanistan. The Taliban are on the advance and so far they have rejected a peace agreement with the government in Kabul. Many so-called local employees who have worked for the German armed forces, police trainers and development workers are now also afraid of death. For them it is particularly threatening that the Taliban were able to expand their power in the north of the country, the former German operational area.
The fact that the Taliban are now focusing heavily on this region has to do with the fact that they want to “prevent the formation of a second northern alliance,” says Obaid Ali, a researcher at the independent Kabul Afghanistan Analysts Network. The Taliban wanted to counter a possible union of powerful regional princes who stood up to them during their regime between 1996 and 2001.
“The threats are great”
When asked by the Afghan Ministry of Defense in Kabul, a spokesman stressed that in the Balkh province, the capital of which is Mazar-i-Sharif, government troops carried out massive operations against the Taliban and inflicted heavy losses on the Islamists. “All threats to Mazar-i-Sharif have also been repulsed.” A resident of the city said by telephone: “The security situation is very critical, the threats are great, there is a lot of Taliban activity in the outskirts of the city.” At any moment there is a risk that Mazar-i-Sharif will be “attacked,” said the man, who insisted on anonymity.
On Thursday evening, a group of 40 local staff met in Mazar-i-Sharif to “advise in secret. It is clear to us that we have to get to Kabul as soon as possible,” said one of the men, who did not want to be named. The local employee, who has not yet received a German visa for departure, reported that neither the International Organization for Migration (IOM) of the United Nations, to which the federal government has outsourced part of the application process for the departure after the withdrawal of the Bundeswehr, nor “someone else from the German authorities” has been by their side so far.
The Federal Government emphasizes that it has already done a lot for the local staff, such as accelerating the bureaucratic procedure for leaving the country. But critics complain that the Federal Foreign Office, the Ministry of the Interior, Development and Defense, all of which have employed local staff in Afghanistan, shift responsibility back and forth among each other. It is criticized, among other things, that they would have to submit a “hazard report” in order to be eligible for a visa.
Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, however, told the SZ that it was up to each ministry to decide whether local staff had to submit a plausibly justified report of danger or whether, as required by the Federal Ministry of Defense, a risk was automatically assumed if someone was demonstrably local staff. “As the Federal Ministry of the Interior, we are not slipping in,” said Seehofer. So he is not responsible if local staff have to wait longer to leave the country than they would like.
A flight costs two to five months’ salary
The German government also refers to 2,400 visas that have already been issued for former Afghan employees and their families. Marcus Grotian, who runs the “Sponsorship Network Afghan Local Staff” in his spare time, assumes that of these 2400 people, only about 100 have so far reached Germany. Grotian, who was a soldier in the German Armed Forces in Afghanistan in 2011, calculates that in addition to the visas that have already been granted, around 2000 other people as local staff and family members would have to get a visa. The attitude of the federal government: Every local employee must bear the costs of departure for himself and the family members.
According to a travel agency in Kabul, a single scheduled flight with Turkish Airlines from the Afghan capital via Istanbul to Frankfurt costs $ 1,850 for a family of four. Depending on the activity, this corresponds to around two to five monthly salaries for a former local employee.
Grotian’s association is now collecting donations, initially in order to be able to bring the remaining local workers from Mazar-i-Sharif and other parts of the country to safe accommodation in Kabul. Then the association wants to support the application process for the visa. “We want all local workers who want to leave the country to be flown out in 14 days,” says Grotian. If they cannot be distributed among the line machines, thought must also be given to charter a machine privately: “Time is short, the people who have worked for us are in mortal danger,” says Grotian.
An Afghan journalist worked on this story. For security reasons, his name is not disclosed.