Twenty Years after 9/11, Germany Still Struggling with Militant Islamists

In addition, there are another 527 “relevant persons.” These are people in the wider circle of those dangerous persons whom the authorities think could provide logistical or other support for terrorist acts. 

The number of Islamist dangerous persons in Germany has fallen by around a quarter since December 2019. At that time, the federal government named 679 religiously motivated threats in response to a parliamentary question by the Free Democratic Party (FDP). 

Islamic scholar Michael Kiefer confirms that since the failure of the “Islamic State” in Syria, militant forces have been pushed back in favor of classic Islamist networks. But Kiefer also emphasizes that the issue will remain relevant.

 A look at the reports of Germany’s intelligence service — the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution — confirms this. Twenty years ago, the topic of Islamism was still included in the section on “security threats and extremist efforts by foreigners.” The most recent report on the protection of the constitution has its own chapter on “Islamism/Islamist terrorism” that is just under 70 pages long.

War Crimes and Recruitment

The increase in Islamist movements worldwide and also in Germany has to do with the way the “war on terror” — proclaimed two decades ago by then US President George W. Bush — was conducted. The attack on Iraq in 2003 in violation of international law, the reintroduction of torture under the euphemistic term “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the decades-long detention of people without any court judgment at the US naval base at Guantanamo, the abuses by private security firms, and Bush’s “crusade” rhetoric all played a role in Islamist propaganda. “People were happy to take that up and develop their victim narratives from it,” Michael Kiefer explains. This has made it possible to make terror seem like a defensive war.

Political scientist Julian Junk of the Hessian Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research agrees. “We can state that the extralegal methods in the ‘War on Terror’ have had a mobilizing effect for Salafist and jihadist groups,” Junk told DW. “These experiences of injustice can contribute to radicalization processes, but they are rarely monocausal.”

Internet, Propaganda, and Prevention
But Junk also points to other factors that have played a role in the past 20 years such as developments in technology: “We now have drones, internet algorithms, the ability to organize quickly and transnationally in encrypted form and to share information and let ideas wander. All of this contributes to the feeling that there is more mobilization for terrorism, and, at the same time, more fear of it.” These new technologies, however, also open up scope for countering terrorism with preventive or policing measures, Junk said.

The keyword is prevention. More than 1,000 Germans left for the territory of the terrorist caliphate in Syria and Iraq after 2014 to join the “Islamic State.” The wave of departures took the German authorities by surprise, says Islamism expert Kiefer. But then the federal and state governments spent a lot of money on prevention programs. Kiefer says over €100 million ($120 million) are spent annually. These funds are directed specifically against Salafism. Its conservative interpretation of Islam often provides the ideological basis for militant jihadists.

Salafists consider themselves the sole representatives of the true faith and devalue others. This extreme black-and-white thinking demonizes enemies and denies them humanity. As Michael Kiefer notes, this is a characteristic that Islamists share with right-wing extremists. 

Matthias von Hein is a DW reporterThis article is published courtesy of Deutsche Welle (DW).