- As many as 20,000 people apply for passports in Afghanistan every day.
- The biometric device is malfunctioning due to the number of applications.
- Officials said the office was closed.
The head of the Kabul Passport Office said that under the pressure of processing thousands of applications every day, the Kabul Passport Office was forced to suspend operations after the equipment used to sign physical identification documents malfunctioned.
Concerns about the future of Afghanistan under the leadership of the new Taliban government, and the growing economic and humanitarian crisis that threatens the unemployment and starvation of millions of people, have exacerbated the exodus, with thousands of people crossing the border every day.
Read | Taliban launches operations against Islamic State in Afghanistan: 4 dead, 10 arrested
According to Alam Gul Haqqani, the head of the passport department, as many as 15,000 to 20,000 people camp outside the office in Kabul every day, five or six times the number that the office can handle, many of them on the sidewalk. Stay overnight.
He said that many people were forced to come back day after day after failing to submit their applications, and the biometric machines often broke down while processing documents, causing further delays.
He told Tolo News on Monday night:
In order to prevent people from suffering this kind of pain and avoid being disturbed, we decided to stop the activities of the passport department for a few days.
He added that the office will reopen soon.
On Tuesday, the Ministry of the Interior stated that 60 people, including some members of the passport department, were arrested for using forged or forged documents to obtain passports.
There are also increasing complaints that people are forced to pay bribes to officials to get their applications approved.
In addition to the charter services of other airlines, the state-owned Ariane Afghani Airlines and the privately-owned Kam Airlines provide regular flights from Kabul to Dubai and Islamabad, and international flights have slowly resumed operations.
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