2023-07-08 00:35:44
The arrest of suspected Islamist terrorists sharpens the senses about a danger that had never ceased to exist in Germany and, furthermore, recalls the attack on a Berlin Christmas market in 2016.
Seven suspected Islamist terrorists were arrested this Thursday, July 6, in the North Rhine-Westphalia region. The German Attorney General’s Office accuses the suspects, mostly from Tajikistan, of founding a terrorist organization in June 2022 and planning attacks. They would also have supported the terrorist organization Islamic State (IS).
The men have already targeted possible targets in Germany, the German supreme prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe said. In addition, the defendants tried to acquire weapons, but did not yet have plans for specific attacks.
Since the 2016 attack in Berlin at the latest, people in Germany have been aware of the dangers of Islamist terrorism. It was the most serious religiously motivated attack in the country. Twelve people were killed when radical Islamist Anis Amri crashed a truck into a Christmas market on Breitscheidplatz square.
According to the German Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, the danger of more attacks is still great: “That is why our security authorities are counting on the preparations to attack at any moment.”
Warnings about Islamist lone authors
“The danger persists. It is real, every day,” said the president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, on June 20, at the presentation of the report on the protection of the Constitution. «I speak precisely of violent groups and for this reason I must not ignore the Islamists. Last year, in fact, many successes were again achieved at the international and national level against Islamist terrorism. Fortunately, here in Germany there were no proven Islamist attacks in 2022.
But “the situation is dominated in particular by small groups and authors acting alone,” Haldenwang had warned a year earlier, when presenting his annual report. Something that now sounds almost like a prophecy: the men arrested this Thursday seem to fit that pattern.
Germany, difficulties in the fight against terrorism
According to Minister Faeser, 21 Islamist attacks have been prevented in Germany since 2000. This, of course, would not have been possible without the support of foreign secret services, especially the US, the Islamist expert concluded. and terrorism Guido Steinberg, of the Berlin Science and Policy Foundation (SWP), in a study commissioned by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
In the long term, Steinberg warned in his 2021 study, it is risky to leave part of the German counterterrorism fight in the hands of the United States. The expert believes that the sharp drop in the number of attacks and attack plans, after the 2016 attack on the Berlin Christmas market, is mainly due to the decline of the terrorist organization Islamic State (IS) in the Middle East and the improvement of the technical recognition by the US and “less to the effectiveness of the German fight against terrorism, still fragmented, incomplete and prone to errors,” he says in his analysis.
Since 2004, 38 German authorities have been working together at the Joint Counter-Terrorism Center (GTAZ).Picture: Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa/picture alliance
More information sharing
Due to the German federal structure, all 16 states have their own Police and Office for the Protection of the Constitution. For a long time, they barely communicated with each other. Since 2004, they have exchanged information with representatives of federal security agencies at the Joint Center against Terrorism (GTAZ) in Berlin.
In this way, they have eliminated many coordination problems, praises Guido Steinberg, but there is still a lot to be done, as the case of Anis Amri showed. The North Rhine-Westphalia State Criminal Police Office correctly recognized “that the Tunisian was a dangerous terrorist and was consequently under observation.”
But when Amri moved to Berlin, in February 2016, and was trafficking drugs there, the Police classified him as just a common criminal, so they “stopped watching him and, therefore, there were no longer any obstacles to prevent the attack.” on the Breitschedplatz. A subsequent investigation, commissioned by the Berlin Senate, corroborated that it had been a state failure, due to the circumstances of the change of region.
The fact that the danger is sometimes underestimated may also be due to the sharp decrease in the number of people considered a “threat” in recent years. In 2018, the German Police registered more than 770 people suspected of being able to commit a terrorist attack in the country. In 2020, the number dropped to 630 and meanwhile, it is about 530.
(rmr/rml)
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