BERLIN: Germany said Friday it had agreed a plan with Turkiye under which Berlin will step up deportations of failed Turkish asylum seekers, but Ankara denied any such deal had been struck.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser posted on X that “we have now reached a point where returns to Turkiye can be carried out more quickly and effectively and that Turkiye will more speedily take back citizens who are not allowed to stay in Germany.
“This is another building block in limiting irregular migration.”
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) daily reported that Turkiye had offered to soon take back up to 500 citizens per week on “special flights.”
In return, Germany would ease visa rules for Turkish citizens wanting to visit the EU country for holidays or business trips, it said.
The FAZ report said the plan had been agreed after months of talks between the offices of Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The German interior ministry declined to officially comment on the details of the reports when contacted by AFP.
But later Friday, Turkiye’s foreign ministry said the reports “regarding the return of our citizens who do not have a legal right to reside in Germany to Turkiye is not true.
“No practice of mass deportation of our citizens has been authorized,” a ministry spokesman said in a message on social media platform X.

There has been heated debate about irregular immigration in Germany and other EU member states.
Germany’s relations are sensitive with Turkiye, a fellow NATO member and home to Europe’s largest Turkish diaspora of some three million people.
Many of them are part of the wave of so-called “guest workers” invited to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, and their descendants.
The Scholz government has been under heightened pressure after a series of violent crimes and extremist attacks committed by asylum seekers.
The debate has fueled the rise of the far-right and anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party a year ahead of national elections.
The FAZ reported that an initial 200 Turkish citizens would be flown out to Turkiye on several scheduled flights leaving from a number of airports.
Beyond that, it said Turkiye had offered to take back up to 500 citizens per week from Germany on what would be declared “special flights” rather than charter flights.
The daily said the number of Turkish asylum requests in Germany rose sharply last year, with most applicants declaring they were members of the Kurdish minority.
This year, Turkish citizens accounted for the third-largest number of requests for asylum, after those from Syria and Afghanistan.
However, only a small minority of recent applications by Turkish nationals have been successful.
According to Germany’s interior ministry, the number of Turkish nationals in Germany required to leave has topped 15,000.
However, fewer than 900 were deported last year and thousands received stays of deportation, often because they declared they lacked valid travel documents, FAZ said.
 

WASHINGTON: The US announced an agreement with the Iraqi government Friday to wrap up the military mission in Iraq of an American-led coalition fighting the Daesh group by next year, with US troops departing some bases that they have long occupied during a two-decade-long military presence in the country.
But the Biden administration refused to provide details on how many of the approximately 2,500 US troops still serving in Iraq will remain there or acknowledge it will mark a full withdrawal from the country.
“I think it’s fair to say that, you know, our footprint is going to be changing within the country,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters Friday without providing specifics.
The announcement comes at a particularly contentious time for the Middle East, with escalating conflict between Israel and two Iranian-backed militant groups — Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza — threatening a broader regional war. Bases housing US forces and contractors have been regularly targeted by Iran-backed militias over the last several years, and those attacks intensified late last year and early this spring after the Israel-Hamas war broke out nearly a year ago.
For years, Iraqi officials have periodically called for a withdrawal of coalition forces, and formal talks to wind down the US presence in the country have been going on for months.
US officials who briefed reporters Friday said the agreement will bring about a two-phase transition in the troops assigned to Iraq that began this month. In the first phase, which runs through September 2025, the coalition mission against Daesh will end and forces will leave some longstanding bases.
Following the November election, American forces will start departing from Ain Al-Asad air base in western Iraq and from Baghdad International Airport, according to Iraqi government officials who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. Those forces will be moved to Hareer base in Irbil, in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region.
In the second phase, the US will continue to operate in some fashion from Iraq through 2026 to support counter-Daesh operations in Syria, a senior Biden administration official and a senior defense official said on the condition of anonymity on a call with reporters to provide details ahead of the announcement.
Ultimately, the US military mission would transition to a bilateral security relationship, the US officials said, but they did not indicate what that might mean for the number of American troops who remain in Iraq in the future.
The Iraqi officials said some American troops may stay at Hareer base after 2026 because the Kurdistan regional government would like them to stay.
“We have taken an important step in resolving the issue of the international coalition to fight Daesh,” Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Al-Sudani said in a speech this month. He noted “the government’s belief in the capabilities of our security forces that defeated the remnants of Daesh.”
The continued presence of US troops has been a political vulnerability for Sudani, whose government is under increased influence from Iran. Iraq has long struggled to balance its ties with the US and Iran, both allies of the Iraqi government but regional archenemies.
“We thank the government for its position to expel the international coalition forces,” Qais Khazali, founder of Asaib Ahl Al-Haq — an Iran-backed Iraqi Shia militia that has conducted attacks against US forces in Iraq — said last week.
But critics caution that this year’s surge of Daesh attacks in Syria across the desert border from Iraq suggest the drawdown in Iraq is a “really significant cause for concern,” said Charles Lister, a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute research center in Washington.
The US withdrawal from Iraq isn’t because Daesh has disappeared, Lister said. “The withdrawal is because there’s a significant proportion of the policy-making community in Baghdad that doesn’t want American troops on Iraqi soil.”
The agreement marks the third time in the last two decades that the US has announced a formal transition of the military’s role there.
The US invaded Iraq in March 2003 in what it called a massive “shock and awe” bombing campaign that lit up the skies, laid waste to large sections of the country and paved the way for American ground troops to converge on Baghdad. The invasion was based on what turned out to be faulty claims that Saddam Hussein had secretly stashed weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons never materialized.
The US presence grew to more than 170,000 troops at the peak of counterinsurgency operations in 2007. The Obama administration negotiated the drawdown of forces, and in December 2011, the final combat troops departed, leaving only a small number of military personnel behind to staff an office of security assistance and a detachment of Marines to guard the embassy compound.
In 2014, the rise of the Daesh group and its rapid capture of a wide swath across Iraq and Syria brought US and partner nation forces back at the invitation of the Iraqi government to help rebuild and retrain police and military units that had fallen apart and fled.
After Daesh lost its hold on the territory it once claimed, coalition military operations ended in 2021. An enduring US presence of about 2,500 troops stayed in Iraq to maintain training and conduct partnered counter-Daesh operations with Iraq’s military.
In the years since, the US has maintained that presence to pressure Iranian-backed militias active in Iraq and Syria. The presence of American forces in Iraq also makes it more difficult for Iran to move weapons across Iraq and Syria into Lebanon, for use by its proxies, including the Lebanese Hezbollah, against Israel.