Above all, local staff and other “particularly vulnerable people” received visas. This number will continue to rise, since visas are currently being issued “non-stop,” said the Foreign Office on Wednesday. The majority of the applications are processed by the German embassy in the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office in Berlin put the number of visas issued on Wednesday at 5,925. Almost 4,000 of these were exhibited in Islamabad.
“Since it is currently not possible for Afghan nationals to enter Uzbekistan and India, it is currently primarily the task of the embassy in Islamabad to process a large number of visa applications from Afghan nationals,” said the Foreign Ministry. But other German diplomatic missions in the region such as Tashkent, New Delhi, Tehran, Doha, Ankara and Istanbul were also active in the matter. The diplomatic offices in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and India are “fully operational”, according to the Foreign Office.
The Taliban had taken power in Afghanistan in August after 20 years of fighting against the US and NATO troop-backed government. During the hasty withdrawal of the Bundeswehr and other German institutions, thousands of local aid workers were left behind in the country. The German government is trying to get them to leave because many of them fear acts of revenge by the Taliban.
Source: Nachrichten
