Germany flies 23 Afghan men to Kabul as Merz government speeds removals

Germany flew 23 Afghan men from Leipzig/Halle airport to Kabul before dawn on Tuesday, the second charter of its kind that has included people who were not all serving sentences for violent crime. The interior ministry said on X that those on board were “largely offenders convicted of serious crimes, including sexual offences and causing bodily injury.” A ministry spokesman told AFP that every man on the flight had “come to the attention of the criminal justice system” in Germany. The ministry did not publish individual charges or the share who had completed their sentences.

Video circulated by Bild showed the group boarding the aircraft as protesters inside the terminal held a banner reading “Stop Deportations — Refugees Welcome.” The Alliance Against Deportations said about 50 people came to the airport. Spokesman Kai Adeel told AFP the flight was “extremely dangerous” for those on board and that Afghans sent back “face exclusion, torture or even death” under Taliban rule.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said society has “a clear interest in ensuring that criminal offenders leave our country” and that anyone without a right of residence “must expect to leave.” He told Bild the government would keep the policy “with consistency.” Since the current coalition took office in mid-2025, 228 Afghan men have been returned, a ministry official said, counting Tuesday’s flight.

How Berlin reopened a route that had been closed

After the Taliban seized Kabul in 2021, most European governments stopped scheduled returns. Germany spent years arguing that it could not deport people to a state it did not recognise and whose prisons and courts it did not trust. That position shifted as Chancellor Friedrich Merz made border control and removals a central pledge. Berlin opened a channel with the Taliban authorities that allowed charters to land. In July it sent back a first Afghan whose asylum claim had been refused and who had no criminal record. Tuesday’s flight followed earlier group removals of 32 men in June and 31 in July.

The legal category on the passenger list is “required to leave the country.” That can mean a rejected asylum claim, a completed prison term plus a deportation order, or a mix of immigration and criminal files. Dobrindt’s public emphasis is on sex offences and assault. The ministry’s written statement uses “largely,” which leaves room for men whose contact with the justice system was less serious. One man returned at the end of July later told dpa he had arrived in Germany at 14 and had partly lost his Dari.

Afghanistan is in a documented humanitarian crisis. UNICEF said this week that one million Afghan children have life-threatening severe acute malnutrition and that the agency’s nutrition appeal is only 22 percent funded. Those facts do not, under German law, create an automatic bar on removing adult men who have no protection status. They do shape the political fight over whether a return to Kabul is a safe return.

Domestic politics and the Ceuta argument

Merz’s government is trying to show that it can remove people after a decade in which Germany took in large numbers of refugees. The Alternative for Germany has used migration, including the recent rush at Spain’s Ceuta crossing, to pressure conservative voters ahead of state elections. Dobrindt’s charters are a visible reply. Each departure is filmed. Each statement names sexual violence. The message is aimed at German television as much as at Kabul.

Courts still review individual cases. A group charter does not erase the right to seek an injunction. What has changed is the existence of an aircraft and a receiving authority willing to take the passengers. Without that pair, a deportation order stays on paper.

The Taliban have an interest in the channel as well. Accepting deportees is a form of practical recognition. It also returns men who may have no family left in the districts they once left as teenagers. What happens to them after they leave the airport in Kabul is not part of the German ministry’s statement. Adeel’s warning and UNICEF’s caseload are the available public record on conditions after arrival.

Tuesday’s flight closed, in the ministry’s words, “successfully.” The next charter will be judged by the same two measures Berlin is now using: how many men leave, and how many of them can be described as offenders. The humanitarian file on the other end of the runway is being kept by a different set of institutions, and it is getting worse.