Waiting for evacuation
Afghans died during admissions process
4/4/2022 10:27 p.m
By mid-February, Germany had accepted around 30,000 people in Afghanistan, but so far not even half of them have been able to enter the country. Several Afghans have died while awaiting evacuation. The federal government speaks of “individual deaths”.
Several Afghans who had been accepted by the German government or were in the admissions process apparently died before they could be flown to Germany. This emerges from the response of the federal government to a small request from the left, as reported by “Spiegel”.
“The federal government is aware of individual deaths,” it says in response to a question about the evacuation of local workers and other vulnerable people from Afghanistan. Existing admission commitments for family members were “maintained in these cases”. The federal government does not provide more details.
To this day, thousands of endangered Afghans are waiting to be brought to Germany. The Federal Government’s replies show that by mid-February the German government had given around 30,000 people an acceptance letter. These are former local staff, their relatives and other particularly vulnerable people. Only around 14,000 of them, i.e. not even half, were able to enter Germany.
Left-wing member of the Bundestag Clara Bünger criticized the government for the delays in the evacuation. “We now know that the indescribable failure of the federal government has already had fatal consequences,” she told the “Spiegel”. “It’s almost unbearable to imagine that Afghans who trusted in the protection of Germany fell victim to the Taliban because, despite strong warnings, evacuations started too late and procedures were too bureaucratic.”
The militant Islamist Taliban conquered large parts of Afghanistan last year after the start of the withdrawal of international NATO troops. In mid-August they moved into the capital Kabul without a fight and have been in power ever since. They had previously ruled the country from 1996 to 2001.