(Politico) Shakerah Baresh and her four children were on one of the last planes to Germany.
Baresh, the former principal of a girl’s school in Afghanistan’s northeastern Panjshir province, arrived in Germany with her children at the end of March, just weeks before German Chancellor Friedrich Merz came to power with a vow to drastically curtail the influx of asylum-seekers into Germany.
Before their flight touched down in the central German city of Hannover, Baresh and her children had been among the some 2,500 Afghans living in Islamabad, Pakistan, where they had been waiting to be resettled in Germany after authorities deemed them particularly vulnerable following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.
After Merz became chancellor, however, the German government effectively suspended the program and stopped the flights, a decision that stranded the Afghans — among them women’s rights activists and LGBTQ+ people — in Pakistan.
