BERLIN — Shakerah Baresh and her four children were on one of the last planes to Germany.
Baresh, the former principal of a girl’s school in Afghanistan’s northeastern Panjshir province, arrived in Germany with her children at the end of March, just weeks before German Chancellor Friedrich Merz came to power with a vow to drastically curtail the influx of asylum-seekers into Germany.
Before their flight touched down in the central German city of Hannover, Baresh and her children had been among the some 2,500 Afghans living in Islamabad, Pakistan, where they had been waiting to be resettled in Germany after authorities deemed them particularly vulnerable following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.
After Merz became chancellor, however, the German government effectively suspended the program and stopped the flights, a decision that stranded the Afghans — among them women’s rights activists and LGBTQ+ people — in Pakistan.
“These people are praying for the German government to not stop the program,” said Baresh from her new home in a western German town not far from the Rhine River. “There is no other option for them. They can’t go back.”
After the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan, Western countries initially provided escape routes to vulnerable Afghans, particularly those who had assisted their militaries during the two-decade-long war that began after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. Germany was the third-largest destination for resettled Afghans after the U.S. and Canada. But anti-immigration sentiment across the West, including in America and Germany, has brought about what activists and experts say is a premature end to those resettlement programs.
“It’s a double hit, both to resettlement programs globally and to this specific population in Pakistan,” said Susan Fratzke, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
Under pressure from the far right
Germany is not the only country closing the door to Afghans seeking refuge. Earlier this year, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending refugee admissions to the U.S., leaving thousands of Afghan nationals awaiting resettlement in Pakistan. This month, Trump issued a proclamation blocking Afghan nationals from traveling to the U.S.; his administration also terminated temporary protected status for Afghans.
Germany is taking a somewhat similar course. Under increasing political pressure due to the rise of the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) — now the country’s largest opposition party — Merz has vowed to sharply cut the number of asylum-seekers allowed to enter the country. In the lead-up to Germany’s Feb. 23 snap election, a spate of knife attacks partly blamed on Afghan migrants also increased pressure on Merz to take a harder course on Afghan resettlement, particularly as AfD politicians called for the mass deportation of Afghans and other migrants.
Merz’s conservative-led government vowed in its coalition agreement with the center-left Social Democratic Party to “end voluntary federal admission programs as far as possible and not set up any new programs.” In practice, that means resettlements “are currently suspended until a decision is made,” according to an interior ministry spokesperson.
Some German government officials are also raising doubts as to whether Afghans in resettlement programs have been properly vetted. Officials at the German Embassy in Islamabad suspect that thousands of the Afghans who have been resettled in Germany “wrongly received a confirmation of admission and subsequently a visa” based on false statements, according to a report in German magazine Der Spiegel that cited an internal 2023 document and anonymous sources. Among them were people with close links to the Taliban, according to the Spiegel report.
A spokesperson for Germany’s foreign ministry, which partly runs the resettlement program and has been criticized for the alleged security breaches, underscored that its program for Afghans is among the country’s most secure admission procedures and entails multiple security interviews by German intelligence officers.
Germany has resettled 36,400 Afghan nationals since the Taliban’s return, according to the foreign ministry. The biggest share of the resettlements came in the immediate aftermath of the takeover and were largely meant to protect those who had worked with Western governments or were otherwise endangered under the Taliban’s severe brand of Islamic fundamentalism.
‘Matter of life and death’
Baresh said the Taliban had shut down her school for girls and that she had been arrested repeatedly for her advocacy of women’s rights. The third time she was arrested, she said, the Taliban threatened her life, with one man telling her “one bullet is enough.”
Following the threat she went into hiding for a year while her children went to live with a family member in Kabul. A German nongovernmental organization then helped Baresh apply for the German resettlement program.
She, like others accepted by the German government, went to Pakistan to await resettlement. Reunited with her children there, she waited over a year for the chartered flight that took them to Germany.
Others continue to wait. In public statements, some German leaders say they will honor commitments to those they’ve already agreed to resettle.
“Where we have given legally binding admission commitments, we will of course keep them,” said Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul in the Bundestag in June.
When asked about these comments, a spokesperson for the interior ministry said authorities were looking into how to “terminate voluntary admission programs to the degree possible.”
Meanwhile, activists say the Afghans awaiting resettlement in Pakistan are growing increasingly exasperated.
“The people on site are panicking,” said Jörg Hutter, who works for the LSVD+ rights organization and helps with the resettlement of LGBTQ+ people from Afghanistan. “It’s not clear to anyone whether they will get out alive or not. And that increases traumatization.”
Meanwhile, the situation for Afghans who have fled to Pakistan is deteriorating. More than 280,000 Afghans were pressured to return home or were deported to Afghanistan from Pakistan and Iran in April, according to a UNHCR report, many of them women and girls who face oppression under Taliban rule.
Baresh expressed her deep appreciation to the German government for resettling her family. “We’re safe now and can live like humans again,” she said.
She then appealed to the German authorities. “Please, bring the refugees that are now in Pakistan, especially the activists, to Germany,” she said. “Because it’s a matter of life and death.”
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