🇦🇫 🇪🇺 🚷 The Taliban Are Using Europe’s Fear of Migrants to Their Advantage

At a meeting in Brussels in late June, more than 20 European officials met with five Taliban representatives to discuss deportations, breaking a taboo against holding talks with the group in the European Union.

The Europeans never mentioned human rights abuses committed by the Taliban, according to three participants and three other officials briefed on the meeting.

But the Taliban see sustained engagement on deportations as a gateway to acceptance of their rule, five years after sweeping back to power. Some European diplomats acknowledge this is correct.

Germany has been leading the charge to expel Afghans, as its government, led by a center-right chancellor, struggles to follow through on promises to deport migrants with criminal records aggressively. Its pace of deportations has drawn fire from a surging far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which leads national polls and has promised to deport millions of migrants.

More than 500,000 Afghans live in Germany, the vast majority legally. Twenty percent of asylum seekers in the country are Afghans.

The pact with the Taliban “creates a reliable basis for direct and permanent deportations to Afghanistan,” Alexander Dobrindt, the German interior minister, said in a statement.

France, which has long been one of the most reluctant among E.U. countries to engage the Taliban, is considering a similar path, according to four European and Afghan diplomats involved in the negotiations.

Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban ambassador to Qatar, said he tells European diplomats that they should engage more openly with the Taliban and provide economic assistance to Afghanistan.

If they don’t, he said, the number of Afghans migrating to Europe will only increase. “If there is unemployment and an economic crisis in Afghanistan, Afghans will go like a flood to Europe.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/12/world/asia/europe-taliban-deportations-migrants.html

https://archive.ph/4i6Fa

🇷🇺⚔️🇺🇦🇷🇴 Russian drones struck the Chemical/Oil Products tanker — YARA J — 8-10 miles east of the Romanian port of Sulina, inside Romanian territorial waters.

The ship is flying under the flag of Comoros and was carrying petroleum products bound for Ukraine.

@CIG_telegram

📖 🇮🇷🛢 Hormuz is the largest energy supply shock on record, says McKinsey

At its peak, the Strait of Hormuz disruption took 14% of global oil and gas supply off the market.

That is more than double the 1970s oil shocks in relative terms, and more than six times the peak impact of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Before the crisis, 91% of the energy flowing through Hormuz was oil and 9% was gas.

The system has held up better than that scale suggests.

3 buffers absorbed the shock, and none of them existed at this scale in 1973:

Strategic stocks: the IEA coordinated a release in March, with the US alone pledging 172M barrels.

Bypass pipelines: Saudi Arabia’s East-West line to the Red Sea and the UAE’s line to Fujairah.

Flexible trade: cargoes rerouted and refiners switched crude grades and suppliers.

Those buffers are being used up.

The US SPR is at its lowest since 1982.

China drew a record 47–57M barrels from storage in September.

The East-West pipeline was hit in September, and October brought the most ship attacks of the war.

A buffer protects you only once.
The question for 2027 is whether stocks get rebuilt before the next disruption.

Source: McKinsey Global Institute

📎 Jack Prandelli

🇺🇸⚡️ — The Trump administration is investigating Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar in an effort to potentially revoke her U.S. citizenship and deport her, according to WSJ.

Investigators are examining allegations that Omar or her late father misrepresented her age during the citizenship process, allowing her to qualify automatically through her father. Federal agents searched her Washington, D.C., home on Monday, seizing electronic devices, notebooks and her passport. More than a dozen subpoenas have also been issued.

A similar allegation was investigated under the Biden administration but dropped due to insufficient evidence.

Authorities are separately examining Omar’s financial disclosures, despite her previously being cleared of wrongdoing by a congressional ethics body.

🇺🇸🇮🇷⚡️ — CNN, citing multiple U.S. officials, reports the United States has developed strike plans against Iran that includes dropping a GBU-43/B MOAB on Iranian nuclear and energy infrastructure. The MOAB is the most destructive non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. inventory.

One source said U.S. Central Command is planning to conduct the strikes quickly then pull out and declare victory.

For this plan to work, U.S. forces would have to pick a surface target, not any of Iran's underground nuclear facilities. The GBU-43/B MOAB is intended for surface-level targets and does not have bunker-buster penetration capabilities.

🇺🇸⚡️ — Footage from April 13, 2017 showing the GBU-43/B MOAB's only use in combat. It was dropped on caves controlled by Islamic State-Khorasan Province in Afghanistan.

🇺🇸🇮🇷⚡️ — One source to CNN reports that President Trump has ruled out sending in ground forces to invade Iran. President Trump remains focused on attempting to present a win to the American people without overly negatively affecting diplomacy with Iran.

One source to CNN reports these strikes are intended to create an off-ramp, allowing Trump to claim a win. CENTCOM appears to be preparing for retaliation by not replacing some servicemembers when troop rotations occur in a few weeks, lowering American personnel present in the CENTCOM area-of-responsibility.