Germany wants to deport convicted criminals to the Taliban's Afghanistan – with another country as an intermediary.
The German government is negotiating such an arrangement with several potential partner countries.
We are working hard to ensure that we can once again deport dangerous Islamists and violent criminals to Afghanistan, says Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, from the Social Democratic Party, to Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung.
For me, German security interests come first.
Germany has no intention of negotiating directly with the extremist Islamist Taliban movement that regained power in Afghanistan in 2021. Following the takeover, the German embassy in Kabul was closed and all deportations there were stopped.
A political debate about resuming deportations to Afghanistan flared up again following a knife attack on an anti-Islam rally in Mannheim, southwestern Germany, in early June. A police officer was killed when a man attacked several people with a knife. A 25-year-old Afghan man has been arrested for the attack and is suspected of having a jihadist motive.
A country that the Interior Ministry has looked at more closely for potential cooperation is Uzbekistan, according to Der Spiegel magazine.
