Ahead of Syrian interim President Ahmed al‑Shaaraya’s visit to Berlin, the German Left party issued sharp criticism of Prime Minister Friedrich Merz (CDU).
Speaking on Sunday, Cansu Özdemir, the party’s foreign‑policy spokesperson in the Bundestag, called Merz’s meeting with al‑Shaaraya “not a diplomatic step but a moral bankruptcy”. She said the German government “supports a regime built on the ruins of al‑Qaeda‑linked networks and whose ideology of oppression, violence and Islamic fanaticism still survives today”. Özdemir claimed this normalization of Islamist leaders ultimately allows them to target minority groups such as Christians, Alawites, Druze, and Kurds.
She went on to state that after permitting a man who now effectively heads the Taliban’s Afghan embassy in Germany to enter the country, the federal government is once again extending a welcoming hand to jihadist structures. According to Özdemir, all of this serves only to pave the way for “mass deportations to Syria in the future”.
