BERLIN/ISLAMABAD: 25-year-old Kimia spends her days drawing ladies in a notebook that contains what’s left of her hopes. She does this by dancing, playing, and protesting in a small guesthouse in the federal capital.
After being accepted into a German humanitarian admittance program for Afghans deemed vulnerable by the Taliban, the visual artist and women’s rights activist left Afghanistan in 2024.
Kimia is still in limbo a year later.
The program was gradually suspended in Germany, thousands of kilometers away, as a result of a change of administration in May and an election in February that focused heavily on migration.
The new center-right coalition now plans to shut it down.
