Author: Michael Slackman
Publication: NDTV.com
Date: October 13, 2010
URL: http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/germany-breeding-ground-for-islamic-radicals-59348
This wealthy port city advertises its bustling
canals and bridges and its towering 19th-century churches to draw visitors
from around the world.
It is less interested in drawing more attention
to Al Quds Mosque, where the September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta prayed and
which has become a destination for jihadi tourism. This summer, local authorities
closed the mosque, since renamed Taiba Mosque, altogether.
Although Germany has been spared the terrorist
attacks that have hit the United States, Britain and Spain, Hamburg -- and
Germany in general -- remains a breeding ground for Islamic radicals, security
officials acknowledge. A spate of recent arrests and terrorism warnings in
Europe and Afghanistan has underscored the risk that a small number of German
citizens are under the sway of terrorist groups determined to stage new attacks,
either in Germany or elsewhere in Europe.
Officials in Hamburg emphasized that the vast
majority of its Muslim population -- which they put at 130,000 -- rejected
violence. But a Hamburg intelligence official said there were 2,000 residents
who embrace radical ideology and another 45 who accept the ideology of Al
Qaeda and global jihad.
"That's what we all experience in America
and in other countries and also here, that this phenomenon of the homegrown
terrorist increases rapidly," said the intelligence official, who spoke
recently on the condition that he not be identified because of the secrecy
of his work. "This is an extremism which grows right here. The recruiting,
the radicalization happens right here, not in other countries."
Recent events have put German citizens at
the center of the global terrorism scare. In July, American forces in Afghanistan
detained a German citizen, Ahmed Sidiqi, 36, said to have ties to the men
who helped plot the September 11 attacks. Then just after Washington issued
the terrorism alert based on information from Mr Sidiqi, Pakistani officials
said that several German citizens were killed in a drone strike.
The United States military also recently issued
an alert for a 23-year-old Berlin man suspected of joining a group called
the German Taliban Mujahadeen. Federal law enforcement authorities here followed
suit with an arrest warrant for the man identified as Hayrettin Burhan Sauerland
amid concerns that he might try to return here from the Pakistan-Afghanistan
border region to stage an attack, possibly against United States military
personnel.
German officials said that the alerts did
not add up to a specific threat, and that the intentions and capabilities
of those arrested remained unclear. They have publicly criticized the decision
by the United States to issue a travel alert for its citizens traveling to
Europe, saying that such announcements play into the hands of terrorists and
scare people needlessly.
"No one should doubt that Germany is
a target for terrorists, but on the other hand there are no concrete, immediate
attack plans that we are aware of," Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière
said on German radio.
Even so, the intelligence official in Hamburg
said Germany did face the "intense abstract danger" of homegrown
radical Islamic terrorism. And this week, the Interior Ministry also said
it had assigned an additional 200 investigators to focus on terrorism.
German officials said that hundreds of their citizens and legal residents
had over the years traveled to the lawless border region between Afghanistan
and Pakistan, and that more than 100 had returned to Germany. There has been
a deluge of statistics coming from Germany's intelligence and police operations
illustrating the growing concern of radicalized young people heading off to
terrorist training camps -- and then returning home to strike.
The newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported that
federal officials identified 131 individuals as possibly prepared to carry
out violent acts. The federal security services said that over the last two
decades, about 215 citizens or legal residents of Germany received or intended
to receive paramilitary training, that 65 completed the training, and that
of the total group, about 105 are in Germany, including 15 in prison.
Those precise-sounding numbers, however, belie
the fact that German officials are struggling to get a handle on how susceptible
their large and mostly peaceful population of Muslims is to the lure to radicals
in far-off places.
"These are the so-called known terrorists,
the suspicious people," said Rolf Tophoven, the director of the Institute
for Terrorism Research and Security Policy in Essen, of the statistics. "But
the unknown people, they don't go to the mosque to pray because they are afraid
to be detected; they don't have meetings in religious institutions, maybe
they come together in a private house. That is a big concern."
Germany first awoke to this reality in 2001,
when three men who worshiped at a Hamburg mosque were identified as leaders
in carrying out the Sept. 11 plot including Mr. Atta, who flew one of the
planes into the World Trade Center.
Memories of that case resurfaced when the
American military arrested Mr. Sidiqi, a German citizen of Afghan heritage
who once worked at the Hamburg airport. The Hamburg intelligence official
that said Mr. Sidiqi had been under surveillance for years and that like Mr.
Atta, he had attended Al Quds Mosque in Hamburg. The official said Mr. Sidiqi
was also a friend of Mounir el-Motassadeq, who was convicted in 2006 for his
role in aiding the September 11 hijackers.
The Hamburg official said Mr. Sidiqi was one
of 11 Hamburg residents who traveled to Pakistan in 2009 in order to fight
on behalf of radical Islamic groups abroad, not at home.
In Hamburg, the decision to close the mosque
was made to deny radicals a symbol to rally people to the cause. But the intelligence
official and German experts on terrorism also acknowledged that closing the
mosque did not get rid of those already radicalized but instead drove them
underground.
"There is some unrest in the Germany
intelligence community that they have overlooked a community of Islamic militants
they didn't realize was here inside Germany, an existing group of terrorists,
a sleeping cell of terror," said Mr. Tophoven, of the Institute for Terrorism
Research and Security Policy. "They are concerned it could exist."
Stefan Pauly contributed reporting
