BERLIN – Germany deported a group of convicted criminals to Afghanistan on Friday, for the first time since 2024.
The deportation flight, which took off from Leipzig on Friday morning, marked only the second such operation since the Taliban seized power in 2021.
Due to Berlin’s lack of diplomatic ties with the radical Islamist militia, Friday’s flight was coordinated with the help of Qatar. It carried 81 Afghan nationals convicted of serious crimes.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz defended the move, saying that all the deported Afghans were rejected asylum-seekers without a right to remain in the country
“We have included plans for such an approach in our coalition treaty, and it has now been completed for the first time today,” he told journalists at a press conference on Friday. The negotiations over the deportations had taken four weeks, he added.
The operation also followed previous calls by Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt for direct talks with the Taliban regime to facilitate regular deportations to the country.
Human rights groups and UN agencies had criticised the remarks, with UN agencies saying that conditions in Afghanistan remained unsafe, pointing to ongoing human rights abuses.
However, Merz said on Friday that there would never be anything more than “technical coordination” between the German government and the Taliban regime.
Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and Dobrindt’s Christian Social Union (CSU) have pushed for stricter asylum rules and expanded deportations, including to Afghanistan and Syria, after the authoritarian President, Bashar al-Assad, was replaced by a rebel-led government in December.
Public pressure had mounted after violent incidents involving rejected asylum seekers in the run-up to Germany’s national elections in February.
The momentum for deportations to Afghanistan and Syria is also building in other European countries: Austria recently became the first EU country to resume deportations to Syria.
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