Portugal to receive about a thousand Afghan refugees
FORPortugal may receive up to a thousand refugees from Afghanistan, announced this Friday night the Minister of Foreign Affairs in an interview with TVI24.
“We are talking about a number that approaches a thousand”, clarified. “For now, because this is dynamic.”
According to Augusto Santos Silva, 227 Afghan refugees are already in Portugal.
The government official recalls that, in the first phase, the priority was to remove the 20 Portuguese citizens who were in Afghanistan and a Portuguese-Afghan family that was identified.
“Then, the Afghan citizens who worked with deployed communications. The Portuguese military who were deployed to the airport in Kabul brought everyone – everyone – who responded to our contact and who managed to reach the airport in Kabul,” he stressed.
At this stage, according to Santos Silva, Portugal is “supporting the others who were unable to reach the airport before it was closed”.
The third priority group are, according to the minister, people who worked for international organizations such as NATO and the UN.
The fourth group “are the people most at risk and most in need of international support: women lawyers, women sportsmen, human rights activists, journalists.”
“We have already received journalists, sportsmen, human rights activists in Portugal, and we are actively involved in bringing in more people”, guaranteed Santos Silva.
The Taliban conquered Kabul on 15 August, concluding a previous offensive in May, when the withdrawal of the US armed forces and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) began.
International frames have been in the country since 2001, in the context of the offensive led by the United States against the extremist regime (1996-2001), which welcomed in its territory the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, mainly responsible for the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
The seizure of the capital ended a 20-year foreign military presence in Afghanistan by the United States and its NATO allies, including Portugal.
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