People to whom Germany owes an answer sat in the public gallery of the German Parliament on Thursday. The relatives of the victims of the attack on the Berlin Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz square are asking themselves how it could have come to this that the Islamist Anis Amri killed eleven people there. In December 2016, he had driven a truck into the market, although the authorities had him as a dangerous person under suspicion. Since then, an investigative committee of the German Parliament has been trying to clarify why the police and the secret services failed. The committee’s work ended on Thursday with a debate in the German Parliament.
The politicians on the committee tried hard, but only briefly mentioned the most important question: Why did Germany allow people like Anis Amri to enter the country? At the height of the asylum crisis, the Tunisian arrived in Germany from Italy via Switzerland in July 2015. According to the committee of enquiry, he was already planning an attack at that time, but at the latest a few months after his arrival.
Amri quickly found Islamist sympathisers and would find them again today. There are currently around 600 Islamists living in Germany whom the authorities believe could carry out attacks. That is almost six times as many potential Muslim terrorists as in 2010. At the height of the asylum crisis, their numbers rose particularly sharply. The often disputed connection between Islamism and immigration is evident.
Fritz Felgentreu, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary group’s representative on the committee, concludes that the security authorities were overwhelmed because of the “enormous immigration from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq” in 2015 and 2016. Why his Social Democrats, and many other parties, nevertheless strongly support this immigration, he did not say.
Amri is a prime example of how the state lost control at that time. With at least 14 different identities, the 23-year-old travelled around the Federal Republic of Germany, applied for asylum and seized social benefits. Amri did not come from a country plagued by need, but from Tunisia – a popular holiday destination. The Counter-Terrorism Centre had him under surveillance. They studied his file over and over again. In the end, the investigators underestimated him also because he started selling drugs. They thought he had now shifted from Islamism to drug crime. It is actually well known that the two phenomena are not mutually exclusive. In Afghanistan, the Taliban finance themselves with opium deals.
There were too many such misjudgements in the Amri case. The security authorities did not make a great job of it. But it would not be enough to point out their failures. It takes more than two dozen police officers to monitor an Islamist dangerous person around the clock. With about 600 dangerous persons, that makes about 14,000 officers. But the police do not have that many personnel. The problem of Islamism can hardly be controlled with the means and resources of the German constitutional state.
The AfD parliamentary group was also involved in the Amri enquiry committee. It asked whether “properly protected borders” would have prevented the attack. Such legitimate questions are too often a matter for the AfD, because imported Islamism, with its medieval image of humankind, stands for everything that Western democracies do not stand for.
Nevertheless, the reactions to Islamist attacks in Western societies sometimes turn out strange. For example, the then German Justice Minister Heiko Maas ( Social Democratic Party) visited a mosque after the attack on the French satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” in 2015 – and had not visited satirists who were making fun of Islam.
The social reactions to Islamist violence are also sometimes strange: a foaming wave of protest swept through the social networks when the European football association Uefa banned the Allianz Arena in Munich from illuminating the stadium in rainbow colours for the Germany-Hungary match. On the other hand, it was surprisingly quiet when a Syrian asylum migrant stabbed a homosexual to death and seriously injured his partner in Dresden in autumn 2020 out of pure homophobia.
With Corona and global warming, there are certainly enough other pressing issues, but there are many indications that Islamism is currently underestimated. Last year, for example, the Federal Prosecutor General’s Office, which is in charge of terrorism, initiated a total of about 600 new proceedings, about two-thirds of which dealt with suspected Islamists.
In the Amri case, German asylum policy was the gateway for an Islamist terrorist. In other criminal cases, violent criminals who had already been convicted elsewhere entered the country. With more than 100,000 asylum migrants per year, Germany continues to take in more people than the authorities can thoroughly investigate. This is fatal for internal security.