TerrorismGermany to strip citizenship from dual nationals joining terrorist groups

Germany will change its citizenship law to allow dual nationals to lose their citizenship if they fight for a foreign terrorist militia. The new law, approved Wednesday by the cabinet, will not be applied retroactively.

“Someone who goes abroad and actually participates in combat operations for a terrorist militia shows that they have turned their back on Germany and its basic values and turned to another foreign power in the form of a terrorist militia,” the federal government said in a statement.

The change to the citizenship law will apply only to adults who have a second nationality. The change will not affect minors.

Fox News reports that dozens of German Islamic State (IS) fighters currently held by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces and the Iraqi government would therefore not lose their citizenship. The United States and its Syrian Kurdish allies are pressing dozens of countries to take back thousands of foreign fighters captured as the IS caliphate crumbled. The issue has triggered an intense debate in Europe over what to do with returning foreign fighters.

The German interior ministry estimates that since 2013, around 1,000 people left Germany to join jihadi terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq. About one-third of these people have already returned to Germany, and some have been prosecuted or placed in rehabilitation programs.

A spokesperson from the interior ministry told DW that the bill was not limited to IS and includes all terrorist militias. 

“A terrorist militia in the sense of the bill is a paramilitary organized armed association, which aims to violently abolish the structures of a foreign state in violation of international law and replace these structures with a new state or to build state-like structures,” the spokesperson said.

That wording of the change in the citizenship indicates that German dual nationals who join rebel groups such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – a pro-independence Kurdish guerrilla group which has been fighting the Turkish state for more than three decades — could also lose their citizenship. Germany has the largest Kurdish diaspora in the world and many German nationals over the years have joined the PKK.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency considers the PKK to be “the biggest and most powerful foreign extremist organization in Germany.”

The United States and the EU have designated the PKK a terrorist group.

The governing coalition has been split over the exact details of the changes to the citizenship law, a disagreement which had led to an impasse. The conservative CDU wanted more sweeping reforms, while the social-democratic SPD pushed for more limited changes to the law.