Those who are brought up to hate supposedly “infidels” from childhood do not give up jihadist ideology so easily later on. The arrest of a terror suspect in Hamburg, which was publicly announced a few days ago, sheds new light on an old problem. The next generation of Islamist terrorists is growing up among us.
The son of a known radical Islamist is said to have prepared an attack in Germany. eXXpress reported. The young man allegedly tried to buy a pistol, ammunition and a hand grenade. During a search of a relative’s flat, which he used, investigators found chemicals for the construction of an explosive device.
The German-Moroccan from Hamburg, who was already arrested in August, is known to have had contact with violent Salafism at an early age. His father, who emigrated to Morocco in 2016, once frequented the Al-Quds mosque in Hamburg, which was later shut down. Later, he was one of the attendees of the Islamist Al-Taqwa mosque. The father knew Mounir el Motassadeq very well, a member of the so-called Hamburg cell around the death pilot Mohammed Atta, who had steered one of the planes into the World Trade Center in New York in 2001.
The Hanseatic Higher Regional Court had sentenced el Motassadeq to 15 years in prison for accessory to murder in at least 246 cases and membership of a terrorist organisation. He was deported to Morocco in 2019, a few weeks before the end of his regular prison term.
It is known of Safia S., who stabbed a police officer with a kitchen knife at Hanover Central Station in early 2016 – when she was 15 years old – that she was forced to attend Islamic lessons at a mosque dominated by Salafists as a child. The Celle Higher Regional Court sentenced her to a six-year juvenile sentence for attempted murder with dangerous bodily harm and supporting a foreign terrorist organisation. The Federal Supreme Court rejected an appeal against the decision in 2018.
It is not always clear to what extent the influence of parents is a factor in the case of Islamists who are prepared to use violence. “In individual cases, something like this is known,” the security authorities say. Experts who intensively study the biographies of terror suspects will probably also take a closer look at the life of the young Hamburg man who is now in custody. In any case, it is known that the arrested man had returned in autumn 2020, probably to study in Germany. However, he did not pass a preparatory course.
However, it is just as possible that the children of radical Salafists abandon their parents’ ideology. This is shown, for example, by the unusual case of a German whose father was a member of the board of the “German-speaking Islam Circle Hildesheim”, which was banned in 2017. The son of a Palestinian provided the Jordanian secret service with information from the environment of the mosque frequented by supporters of the terrorist militia “Islamic State” (IS), as the Thuringian Higher Regional Court later found. The man, who was 34 years old at the time, was sentenced to probation in 2019 for intelligence agency activities.
There is no systematic observation of the children of radical Islamists, such as those who are classified by the police as so-called dangerous persons. The German Office for the Protection of the Constitution only monitors the activities of the offspring of these Salafists when they themselves become conspicuous as Islamists.
And even then, the possibilities of the German domestic intelligence service to store information are very limited, as long as minors are involved. The prerequisite for this is “factual indications” that he or she is planning a particularly serious criminal offence which, for example, endangers the democratic constitutional state. Moreover, the information on suspected extremists from this age group cannot be found in a normal database search. This means that intelligence officers must already know that it exists and where it was filed. For young people between the ages of 14 and 17, special periods for deletion also apply in the case of archiving.
In 2016, the coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats had lowered the age limit for data storage from 16 to 14 years. Three years later, the then German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer ( Christian Social Union, CSU) wanted to abolish it altogether. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), which with Nancy Faeser now provides his successor in office, was against it.
Opponents of lowering the minimum age limit say that anyone who comes to the attention of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a result of parental indoctrination or their own aberrations in childhood should not suffer any disadvantages later on. For example, with the foreigners authorities. Or if they apply for a job as an adult for which a security check is required.
The Federal Office nevertheless considered the abolition of the age restriction in 2019 to be justifiable and necessary. Also because of the expected return of children whose “jihadist parents” had joined the IS in Iraq or Syria. Some of them have experienced atrocities first-hand. In some cases, they were still exposed to Salafist indoctrination in refugee camps after the terrorists were driven out.
Between August 2019 and October 2021, twelve mothers and 42 children – including some orphans – were brought to Germany from camps in north-eastern Syria, according to the German government. Other former IS supporters returned to Germany with their children via other routes.
https://exxpress.at/generation-9-11-hass-auf-unglaeubige-von-mama-und-papa-gelernt/