At a cafe in Frankfurt on October 12th, 2025, Nazira Khairzad, former goalkeeper for Afghanistan’s national women’s team, put her provisional ID on the table and flipped to the portrait page. A red line ran diagonal through her biometric data. Across the top, “Exclusion of deportation (Duldung)” was written in German, and under that, “No residence permit! The holder is required to leave the country!” Since joining her sister in Germany in 2023, Nazira has been searching for a way to stay. Under “duldung” or “toleration,” a status unique to Germany, her deportation order is on hold–but only for as long as the German government deems it necessary.
“It was not my choice to come to Germany,” Nazira had told me a week earlier, calling from her home in Neuberg, where she lives with her parents and two brothers. When the Taliban took over her country in August of 2021, she fled to Italy, risking persecution as a female athlete. When her sister, Nazima Khairzad, who made a name for herself summiting mountains and dominating ski challenges, was hospitalized with a brain tumor in Frankfurt, Nazira packed up her life again. Today, Nazira is the only one in her family without asylum in Germany. “They can send police and they can send me back to Italy,” she told me. “It happened for some people I know.”
I plan to write a 2500-word feature story following Nazira’s relentless efforts to play sports professionally, learn German, and adjust to a new culture, despite her precarious legal status. Nazira’s path fits into a broader narrative about the German government’s recent attempts to block the arrival and integration of Afghans. After the German government set up a program to admit vulnerable Afghans in late 2022, Chancellor Merz has reversed his country’s course, putting Afghan men convicted of crimes on flights back to Afghanistan and announcing plans to deport many others. Meanwhile, Merz has offered Taliban officials consular positions, threatening to legitimize the very regime that forced Nazira to flee.
This piece, which I am still reporting, will foreground Nazira’s search for stability in Germany against the broader context of the country’s mounting rejection of Afghans. I will speak to asylum lawyers in Germany, scholars familiar with the specifics of duldung, and people relevant to Nazira’s story, including her lawyer, sister, parents, and teammates on FC Mittelbuchen.
