Germany has extended the rights to asylum for Afghan civilians who assisted Bundeswehr deployments in the coutry back to 2013, German Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer conceded Friday.

"The two-year deadline has been lifted," said Seehofer, referring to Berlin's previous stance that entry only be granted to Afghans, many of them working as interpreters, who were active in the past two years.

His easing of criteria, declared at the end of a two-day joint conference with interior ministers of Germany's 16 regional states, was welcomed by Boris Pistorius, interior minister of the Lower Saxony state in northern Germany. 

It was good, said Pistorius, that Berlin would also consider applications from former Afghan helpers who had assisted the Bundeswehr and German police deployments more than two years ago — and are now wary of potential Taliban reprisals.

Pistorius said the federal government in Berlin should also be urged to cover the Afghans' cost of travel. 

Last April, Germany's 1,300-troop deployment was still employing about 300 Afghans, as interpreters and in other jobs, according to Germany's Defense Ministry .

On Friday, the news magazine Der Spiegel claimed that in addition to 400 Afghan helpers, their wives and children, a further 1,500 people would now be entitled to apply to shift to Germany.

Seehofer, at the ministers' conference at Rust, a town on the river Rhine in Baden-Württemberg, on the German-French border, acknowledged that the rethink was appropriate.

Previously, Berlin had assumed that former Afghan helpers, "employed five or six years ago, are not subject to such a risk," he asserted.

Contradicting that view, Pistorius of the Social Democrats insisted that "Afghans who have supported the Bundeswehr or our police missions are particularly in the Taliban's crosshairs."

Two-decade German presence in Afghanistan

Germany first sent forces under the US-led ISAF mission, just months after the 2001 al-Qaeda 9/11 plane hijack attacks on New York's twin towers — this international deployment was succeeded by the NATO-led Resolute Support mission. 

Over those two decades, 59 German soldiers lost their lives, 35 of them killed in enemy acts of violence.

On May 1, NATO officially began its US-led withdrawal, due to be completed by September, comprising some 30,000 US service personnel and 7,000 other NATO troops. 

ipj/msh (dpa, AFP, Reuters)