Zarmina Paryani and her four sisters fear they may soon have to again face the persecutors they fled from in Afghanistan — and this time inside Germany.

Paryani and her sisters were imprisoned twice in Kabul for protesting against the Taliban after the Afghan militants retook the capital in 2021, the 27-year-old said. After going into hiding for several months, the family eventually made their way to Germany in search of safe haven.

But now, Berlin has struck a Faustian bargain that allows the Taliban to deepen its diplomatic foothold in Germany in return for cooperation on deporting Afghan migrants back to Afghanistan. For Paryani and other Afghan activists who resisted the Taliban at home, the arrangement is giving their former persecutors new leverage over their lives in exile.

“It’s hard to accept that my fate and my affairs are being discussed with the very same representatives whose oppression, prisons, whippings and violence I fled from,” Paryani, who worked as a midwife in Kabul and now lives in western Germany, told POLITICO.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government first struck a deal with the Afghan government announced last October that gives Taliban officials control of diplomatic missions in Berlin and Bonn in exchange for permission to return Afghan migrants directly to Afghanistan. That cooperation was deepened early this summer with a deal that allows more Taliban officials to work in Germany in return for cooperation on additional deportation flights — now up to three per month.

Under the new deal, Germany has expanded deportations to include not only Afghan men convicted of crimes, but also, more broadly, Afghan men with no protected status or legal right to remain in Germany.

The agreement with the Taliban makes Germany an outlier in Europe, making it the first EU country to allow Taliban-appointed officials to work in diplomatic missions inside the country. Before the agreement, Western-oriented Afghan officials representing the former government in Afghanistan had remained in charge.

The arrangement comes as Merz’s government grapples with rock-bottom approval ratings and the rise of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now the country’s most popular political force, according to polls. The AfD’s surge comes ahead of two elections in the former East Germany, where the far-right party is ahead in polls by wide margins. In one of those states, Saxony-Anhalt, the party may take real governing power for the first time since it was founded in 2013, a result that would serve as a great humiliation for the conservative Merz, who was elected chancellor last year partly on a promise to crack down on migration.

The AfD’s rise is piling pressure on the chancellor to deliver on his election pledge to deport more migrants — even as he insists that working with the Taliban does not legitimize a regime notorious for its human rights abuses. Overall, Afghans are the third-largest group of refugees or people who have fled war to come to Germany, behind Ukrainians and Syrians.

“We are not extending a hand to this Taliban regime,” Merz said in the German parliament in June. “Rather, we are seeking cooperation at the necessary technical level, which is in our country’s national interest.”

‘Nightmares’ and ‘psychological distress’

For Afghan rights activists in Germany, one of the worst consequences of Berlin’s deal with the Taliban is that it may particularly put at risk some 35,000 Afghans who came to Germany under special humanitarian programs for people deemed especially vulnerable to the Taliban. They include Paryani and her sisters in addition to thousands of human rights activists and Afghans who worked with the German military during its nearly two-decade presence in the country.

Paryani and others fear they will have to face the Taliban when attempting to renew their Afghan passports — which they need to extend their humanitarian visas — at Afghan diplomatic missions. Another 321,000 Afghans live in Germany as refugees or with other forms of protected status. They do not necessarily need Afghan passports, unless they want to apply for a permanent residence status.

More generally, activists and refugees also fear the Taliban, with their growing presence in Germany, could gain access to personal information held in databases in German missions, including details about their families, making them susceptible to blackmail and extortion.

“Given my personal history and my stance on extremism, I am concerned for my safety and that of my family,” one former teacher from Afghanistan granted anonymity due to his fear of retribution from the Taliban told POLITICO.

The former teacher, who lives in Germany with a humanitarian visa, said German immigration officials have asked him to renew his expired Afghan passport, a request that he fears will force him to deal directly with his persecutors.

“This situation continues to cause me significant psychological distress,” he said. “Sometimes I wake up at night because of nightmares related to the Taliban and this situation.”

‘Vulnerable to blackmail’

With its handling of the Taliban, Merz’s government is setting a precedent that will be closely watched by other EU countries. Government officials in Austria and Belgium have said they’re watching Germany’s cooperation with the Taliban closely. Taliban officials also held talks focused on deportations with the EU Commission in June in Brussels.

But Hamid Nangialay Kabiri, the former head of the Afghan consulate in Bonn, who quit last September in protest over the initial deal allowing Taliban officials to serve in diplomatic missions in Germany, warned that the German government’s decision to cooperate with the Afghan regime would come back to haunt it — and that the Taliban would use their new leverage over Germany to advance their interests in Europe, including by building networks that intimidate dissidents.

“They are destroying my country, and now they are coming here,” he said. “They are not thinking of diplomacy. They have a lot of plans in their mind.”

It’s a sentiment politicians inside the left-leaning opposition also share.

“The German government has made itself vulnerable to blackmail,” Schahina Gambir, a lawmaker for the Greens who was born in Kabul, told POLITICO. “We’re seeing recognition through the back door. The Taliban are being granted access to embassies, they’re being granted immunity, they’re given channels for dialogue — and at the same time, the situation for women and girls in Afghanistan is getting worse and worse.”

There are already signs that the Taliban are exercising their newfound leverage.

Last May, Kabul unexpectedly halted a deportation flight at the last minute, seemingly seeking to extract additional concessions from the German government. A couple of weeks later, Berlin announced the terms of the latest agreement allowing additional Taliban-appointed officials to work at diplomatic missions in Germany.

Officials in Berlin depicted the new deal as a victory and a practical necessity, allowing for more deportations.

“To increase the number of repatriations, more passports must be issued, more identities must be verified, and so on,” Martin Giese, a spokesperson for Germany’s foreign ministry, said at the time. “To this end, it will also be necessary for more consular officials to be involved.”

But Paryani, the Afghan midwife who fled to Germany with her four sisters, said the Taliban would use their new power to torment them in the country they had sought safety in.

“A Taliban member once wrote to me: ‘Just wait until our embassy in Germany reopens. Then we’ll find you there,'” she said of a comment that had surfaced under one of her social media posts about two years ago. She then deemed it irrelevant because it seemed so unrealistic.

“Today, I feel as though that threat has become a reality,” she said.