France faces a new wave of asylum seekers from Afghanistan, with many coming from conservative areas and some openly supporting groups like the Taliban.

Over the last five years, the number of Afghans arriving in France has increased fivefold from just over 2,100 asylum seekers at the height of the migrant crisis in 2015 to nearly 10,000 reaching in the country last year.

According to a report from Le Figaro, Afghan migrants made up 90 per cent of the 3,500 residents of a makeshift migrant camp in the north of Paris that authorities dismantled just weeks ago.

“While waiting for their asylum application to be considered, or after a refusal, many traffic cigarettes or drugs in an attempt to meet their needs,” a police source told the French newspaper.

While previously many of the Afghans coming to France were political refugees from urban areas, the latest migrants arriving are mostly Pashtuns from rural villages along the border with Pakistan, a Taliban stronghold area. Many are simply economic migrants, looking for a better life.

According to researcher Karim Pakzad, the new migrants “are radicalised. They are imbued with a very conservative, very retrograde Islam, where violence against women is considered normal.”

“They are often in favour of the Taliban. For them, it is unthinkable, for example, to caricature the Prophet Mohammed,” he added….