HANOVER: After months of waiting in Pakistan until the recent German court rulings forced Berlin to offer them refuge, at least 10 families comprising 45 Afghans, who had fled the Taliban after they returned to power in 2021, arrived in Germany on Monday.
The 10 families have been among more than 2,000 registered Afghans caught in limbo in Pakistan after Germany’s conservative-led government this year froze a programme to offer them sanctuary.
They arrived in Hanover on a commercial flight from Istanbul around 2pm, said an AFP reporter and the Airbridge Kabul initiative set up to help those affected.
An interior ministry spokeswoman later confirmed that “45 Afghan nationals entered Germany. These are all individuals who obtained visas through legal proceedings... All of these individuals have fully completed the admission procedure and security screening.”
More than 2,000 Afghans were caught in limbo after Berlin froze its sanctuary scheme
Germany had set up a scheme to offer sanctuary to Afghans who had worked for German institutions or were otherwise deemed at high risk of persecution, including rights activists and journalists, after Taliban’s return.
But the scheme was frozen under conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who took office in May, as part of a wider crackdown on immigration.
As the Afghans had been left stranded in Pakistan, authorities stepped up a campaign to send those without residency back to their native country. Last month, Berlin said, more than 200 Afghans waiting to come to Germany were sent back to their Taliban-run homeland.
While alarm has grown about their fate, Germany has agreed to resume accepting “some of the others”.
The German government said last week that Afghans for whom “courts have found that Germany is legally obliged to issue visas” would travel to Germany “in stages” once they had cleared security checks.
A spokeswoman for the Airbridge Kabul initiative Eva Beyer said the main applicants who arrived on Monday had been involved in “politics, the justice system and journalism”. Around 85 other stranded Afghans have begun legal proceedings against Germany, “and there are more every day”, she said.
Published in Dawn, September 2nd, 2025
