Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister Serik Zhumangarin says Astana intends to increase its trade with Afghanistan through Turkmenistan, taking the current volume of $1 billion to $3 billion in a year.

“We are working on building an alternative route to increase trade with Afghanistan through Turkmenistan. It is hoped that this route will increase Kazakhstan’s trade with Afghanistan from one billion dollars to three billion dollars per year,” said Zhumangarin.

He added that Kazakhstan wants to increase the export of flour and wheat to Afghanistan.

Recently, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan reached an agreement with the Islamic Emirate to establish a large logistics center in Herat province that can store 100 million tons of oil.

Meanwhile, a number of economic experts believe that increasing Afghanistan’s trade and transit with regional countries can have a direct impact on the country’s economic growth.

“Kazakhstan is one of the countries rich in natural resources and still relies more on agriculture. Therefore, if Afghanistan has good relations with Kazakhstan, it can make use of that country’s experiences in mining and mechanization of agriculture,” said an economic expert.

Kazakhstan this week removed the Islamic Emirate from its list of terrorist organization – paving the way for deeper political, economic and commercial relations between the two countries.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed Thursday that Germany will start deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria again after a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant last week left one police officer dead and four more people injured.

The brutal attack in Mannheim, which was captured on video and quickly went viral online, shocked the country, Associated News reported.

Scholz addressed parliament in a speech focused on security Thursday, just days before European elections in which far-right populists across the continent are expected to make big gains.

“It outrages me when someone who has sought protection here commits the most serious crimes. Such criminals should be deported, even if they come from Syria and Afghanistan,” the chancellor said to the applause of lawmakers.

The 25-year-old attacker, who killed a 29-year-old police officer who was trying to stop him, came to Germany in 2014 as an asylum-seeker, AP reported.

“Serious criminals and terrorist threats have no place here,” Scholz added. “In such cases, Germany’s security interests outweigh the interests of the perpetrator.”

Migration has been one of the major topics during the European election campaign that far-right and mainstream parties have been exploiting in order to garner votes from Europeans who have felt disgruntled by millions of new arrivals looking for refuge from wars, hunger, climate change or just trying to build up a better future for themselves.

Referring to Friday’s knife attack, Scholz said that “what happened in Mannheim — the fatal knife attack on a young policeman — is an expression of the misanthropic ideology of radical Islamism. There is only one term for this: terror. Let’s declare war to terror.”

Germany does not currently carry out any deportations to Afghanistan or Syria.

The chancellor said in his speech that his government was already working on solutions to enable the deportation of convicted Afghans to Afghanistan’s neighboring countries. There have been discussions in Germany about allowing deportations to Syria again.

Scholz also promised that deportation rules for all others who commit or support terrorism will be toughened as well.

Many Germans initially welcomed migrants when more than 1 million people from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq came in 2015-16 following wars and instability in their home countries, but the mood has changed in recent years, AP reported.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday called for Moscow to “build up” relations with the Islamic Emirate government in Afghanistan.

Speaking to senior editors of foreign news agencies on the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin said: “We have always believed that we need to deal with reality. The Taliban are in power in Afghanistan… We have to build up relations with the Taliban government.”

This comes after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week that Moscow planned to take the Islamic Emirate off its list of banned terrorist organizations.

“They are the real power” in Afghanistan, Lavrov said at the time, speaking during a visit by Putin to Uzbekistan in Central Asia.

The Islamic Emirate has been designated a terrorist organization in Russia since 2003.
Abdulmanan Omari, Afghanistan’s acting minister of labor and social affairs, is meanwhile attending this year’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

According to the ministry, Omari left for Russia on Wednesday morning.