Germany sends back Afghans for first time since Taliban takeover

The German government has deported 28 Afghan criminals to Kabul for the first time since the Taliban returned to power three years ago, a policy shift following intense pressure to crack down on illegal immigration.
The men, who included convicted rapists and offenders deemed capable of terrorist attacks, were each given €1,000 cash before boarding a Qatar Airways jet, taking off from Leipzig airport shortly before 7am on Friday.
Their expulsion had been negotiated over the past two months via intermediaries in Qatar. Germany stopped deporting people to Afghanistan when the US and its allies left. Berlin did not hold direct talks with the regime, which remains internationally isolated owing to its human rights record.
The move is regarded as a symbolic gesture before elections on Sunday in the eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony, where the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is riding a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment and is predicted to emerge as the largest and second-largest party respectively.
Last Friday a failed Syrian asylum seeker killed three people and injured eight in the western town of Solingen, a knife attack that outraged Germany and was claimed by Islamic State. In May an Afghan asylum seeker had killed a policeman in an attack on members of an anti-Islamic group in Mannheim.
Ralf Stegner, an MP for the ruling Social Democrats, said the expulsion should “promote acceptance for the many refugees who are not guilty of anything”. It would also “limit the political oxygen supply for the populists … and their prejudiced scapegoat politics against refugees,” he told the news magazine Der Spiegel.
Others said that mass expulsions to Afghanistan remained unlikely. “That would require direct state co-operation, which is not possible with the stone-age Islamists of the Taliban,” said Omid Nouripour, leader of the Greens, who share power in the centre-left coalition government.
All 28 migrants expelled on Friday had been convicted of crimes in Germany, had no legal right to remain in the country and had been subject to deportation orders, a spokesman for Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, said.
“In recent months the federal government has made great efforts to achieve the resumption of deportations in such cases and has supported the responsible regional states to this end.” The government remains committed to carrying out such deportations, the spokesman said, adding: “Germany’s security interests clearly outweigh the interests of protecting criminals and dangerous individuals.”
In a further show of determination to respond to public fears, on Thursday the government announced a raft of measures to combat Islamist terrorism and knife crime, including the removal of benefits for asylum seekers who arrived in Germany from other EU countries and who are due to be sent back there under the bloc’s so-called Dublin system.
Scholz, whose party is trailing far behind populists and conservatives in Thuringia and Saxony, defended his record on immigration on Friday, saying the number of asylum applications had fallen by a fifth this year while deportations rose.
“Changes take time,” he told Der Spiegel. “The responsibilities are spread across many shoulders — almost 550 local immigration authorities, 16 federal states with their police authorities and, of course, the federal government organisations.”
He indicated that Germany was ready to step up deportations to both Afghanistan and Syria even though the national constitution and the Geneva Refugee Convention prohibit expulsions to unsafe countries or war zones.
“We respect our constitution in everything we do. However, it is clear that someone who commits a serious offence in our country cannot enjoy the same protection as someone who behaves decently,” Scholz, 66, said.
An opinion poll published on Friday by the Electoral Research Group institute put the AfD in second place in Saxony at 30 per cent, behind the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CSU) at 33 per cent. The pro-Russian and anti-immigrant Reason and Justice party (BSW) polled at 12 per cent.
In Thuringia it put the AfD in front at 29 per cent, ahead of the CDU at 23 per cent with the BSW at 18 per cent.
Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister, told reporters: “I am pleased that we implemented this with partners, there were no direct contacts between Germany and Afghanistan or with the Taliban.”
There is speculation that Germany received assurances from the Taliban that the deported men would not be tortured or killed. The deportation was criticised by Amnesty International.
Alice Weidel, the parliamentary AfD leader, dismissed the government’s migration announcements as “pure panic PR”. She said: “The main parties responsible for the migration disaster and the erosion of internal security are acting as if they are serious about solving the self-inflicted migration crisis shortly before the state elections.”
The AfD is being monitored by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency BfV as a suspected right-wing extremist organisation. The party’s regional organisation in Thuringia has been designated as “definitely extremist”.