Mass exodus: Afghan asylum requests to Europe double

Since the Taliban succeeded in taking control of the reins of power in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of the US forces, the Afghan people have been living in constant fear. The Taliban’s control prompted a huge number of Afghans to flee the country. During the year of the Taliban rule, the number of asylum seekers from the Afghan people to the European Union has increased tremendously.

Euro News revealed that about 6,500 Afghans applied for asylum in the European Union in July 2012, one month before the takeover, this jumped to about 14,400 Afghans who applied in September, although it started to decline in the first months of 2022. However, the number of Afghan citizens applying for asylum is still much higher than in the spring of last year. To put in a better context of how the US withdrawal and the subsequent Taliban control over Afghan immigration to Europe, we need to compare 2021/222 to previous years. Last year, the number of Afghan nationals applying for asylum in Europe more than doubled compared to the previous 12 months, and according to the network, this number is still much lower than in 2015 and 2016 when Afghans – amid continued internal instability and the return of the Taliban – joined hundreds of thousands of Syrians to come to Europe, and during those years, more than 360,000 Afghans sought asylum in the EU.

The Euro News report confirmed that the majority of Afghans applied for asylum in certain countries in the European Union, Germany alone received about one third of the total asylum requests of the European bloc, 23,940 during the period of August last year – when the Taliban took over Kabul – and April, the last month that the European Statistical Office (Eurostat) succeeded in obtaining asylum data, while France was the second most requested destination, receiving 13,730 applications for the first time during the same period of time, but there are some notable exceptions, no Afghan asylum applications were registered in Hungary, Malta, and Liechtenstein. The European network continued that, during the period of July to September, 67% of decisions were accepted, compared to 57% granted between January and October, Kathryn Woolard, director of the European Council for Refugees, said: There are “serious concerns” for Afghan asylum seekers in Europe, along with what she describes as the “asylum lottery,” where protection rates vary widely across the bloc, Woolard said. One of the “long-standing problems” is that Afghans have to wait much longer for asylum than other nationalities, and according to Eurostat data, as of April 2022, there were 97,960 asylum applications from Afghan nationals pending.