EU Border Agency Preparing for Surge of Afghan Migrants

The European Union border agency Frontex is preparing for a surge of Afghan asylum seekers to make their way to Europe.

Frontex Director-General Fabrice Leggeri said this week that his agency was preparing for a wave of migrants to leave the now Taliban-controlled country, noting that millions of Afghans were already displaced in countries like Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey, which borders the EU member-state Greece.

“Our expectation is that depending on what’s going on in Afghanistan of course people in need of international protection might try to flee from Afghanistan. But what will very likely happen first is that the Afghan communities living abroad might try to move to the European Union,” Leggeri told Reuters.

While Leggeri said that the European Union has become better at returning failed asylum seekers to the original countries, he admitted that deportations to Afghanistan would not be possible currently.

“Now you cannot return Afghan people to Afghanistan. Of course, we cannot. But we can return people who pretend they are Afghani people and they are not,” he said, claiming that border officials had become better at detecting the true nationalities of migrants by their dialects.

While Frontex believes that migrants will try and use traditional paths to the EU such as the Balkan route– which saw one million people enter Europe during the 2015 crisis — he noted that Belarus could also become a new pathway for migrants on their way to the European Union.

Since the EU placed sanctions on Belarus for diverting a flight from Greece to Lithuania to snatch a passenger opposed the Belarusian government, Brussels has accused President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime of deliberately facilitating illegal migration into Lithuania and Poland.

According to some reports, Belarus granted tourist visas to thousands of Iraqis and allowed direct flights to Minsk, after which the Iraqis travelled to the borders of EU member-states Lithuania and Poland and were allegedly helped, or in some cases forced at gunpoint, to cross the frontier.

Since the fall of the Afghan government to the Taliban, many have predicted a new wave of migrants could head to Europe, with one humanitarian worker who has operated in Afghanistan for decades stating that as many as three million people may try to enter the continent.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com