The German government is sticking to its plan to return foreign offenders to Afghanistan.

"There will be further deportations to Afghanistan,… in the near future," said the interior minister, Nancy Faeser, during Wednesday's parliamentary question time in the Bundestag (German Parliament).

The minister added that the federal states were working on compiling further lists of migrants who had committed crimes. 

At the end of August, a group of 28 Afghans were deported on a charter flight from Leipzig, Saxony, to Kabul.

It was the first deportation of Afghans since the Taliban took control of Kabul in 2021.

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Measures are 'working'

Faeser also confirmed Wednesday (October 9) that the government intends to send more people back to Turkey. Germany announced last month that it had negotiated a deal with Ankara to return Turkish citizens.

The Turkish government denied the claim. 

Faeser said the deal was a major step forward for Germany in limiting irregular migration.

Speeding up deportations is meant to deter people from coming to Germany seeking protection and is part of the government’s strategy to reduce the number of asylum seekers.

The minister said a drop in applications lodged this year compared with the same period in 2023 showed that the measures were working.

"We are continuing to limit irregular migration. We are implementing the new Common European Asylum system as quickly as possible," Faeser wrote on X.

Despite the fall in asylum applications overall, the number of claims by Turkish nationals has increased.

Of the 179,000 initial asylum applications submitted this year to October, around 23,000 were from Turkish nationals, making Turkey the third most common country of origin for asylum seekers in Germany, after Afghanistan and Syria.

Towards deportation 'on a grand scale'

As well as announcing further deportations to Turkey and Afghanistan, the German government is also examining deportations to Syria.

After the fatal attack on a police officer in Mannheim at the end of May, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that there would be "deportations on a grand scale," to both Afghanistan and Syria.

An attack at a trade fair attack in Solingen, in which three people were killed in August, further fuelled this debate. 

Read AlsoEU's Syria policy shifts amid calls to increase deportation

With Reuters, epd