By Eva Kneifel
In Germany, there is clan crime among its migrants.
So what is it?
It began with large number of migrants from Lebanon in the 1980s.
Although many say it is not a problem, the numbers tell a different story.
Many clans came from the Turkish area around the ancient city of Mardin in southeastern Turkey near the Syrian border, and belong to the Arabic-speaking Mhallami tribal ethnic group. Turkey under the Byzantines and Ottomans and even under the rulers that followed was always tyrannical so was no social advancement and no prosperity.
In the 1940s, economic-related migration began, first to Lebanon, but there was no social and economic integration there, either.
The Mhallami lived in the slums and ghettos around Beirut, even though they had work permits, were openly rejected by the majority society and became objects of intense state repression. So many began to emigrate from there, too, often to Germany.
The emergence of the phenomenon of clan crime in Germany dates back to the 1980s: As a result of the Lebanese civil war, stateless Arab and Palestinian families also emigrated to Germany.
Since they were initially denied access to the labor market and their children were not required to attend school, this encouraged the emergence of parallel societies and their delinquency.
Parts of the large families turned to illegal activities in order to raise their standard of living. The clans‘ areas of activity include drug-trafficking, prostitution, protection rackets, illegal gambling, fraud, robberies, burglaries and thefts.
Since the refugee crisis in Germany in 2015/2016, clans began to recruit refugees from the Syrian civil war and from Iraq to sell drugs to customers, according to reports in the press, citing a German police leader.
In some districts, clans terrorize neighborhoods and entire streets. In 2020, journalists Thomas Heise and Claas Meyer-Heuer wrote” “They have now become a real threat to German civil society.”
Large criminal families settle primarily in metropolitan areas. Berlin is considered particularly affected, where the police believe there are 15 to 20 corresponding clan groups, including the well-known Abou Chaker clan and the Rammo or Remmo(s).
In the capital, at least a fifth of organized crime is attributed to clan structures.
The focal points of clan crime in Germany are North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony and the city states of Berlin (clan crime in Berlin) and Bremen. Many perpetrators belong to a clan or large family that originally comes from Asia Minor and the Arab World.
In German-speaking countries, as of 2018, members of the Abou Chaker clan, the Miri clan, the Remmo clan and the Al-Zein extended family, among others, have become criminally conspicuous.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, the phenomenon is particularly widespread in the Ruhr area and in cities such as Duisburg, Essen, Dortmund and Gelsenkirchen.
There are 13 cities in Lower Saxony where members of large families are known to have been settled.
As of 2015, clan crime was less pronounced in Baden-Württemberg, Saxony, Hamburg and Saarland, and the protagonists mostly do not come from the Arab region, but from the Balkans or Eastern Europe. The information about the federal states in which clan activities have already become known sometimes contradict each other. As of December 2015, there are apparently no known incidents of clan crime in conservative Bavaria in the south, or in Schleswig-Holstein in the far north, or in the eastern German states of Brandenburg,
A large Syrian family has been living in Saxony-Anhalt since 2002 and is based in the city of Naumburg and operates several shisha bars there. The family made national headlines in 2017 after family members of the Syrian clan stormed a Naumburg police station and threatened police officers and their family members with death. The Al-Zein clan and the Ali Khan family and the Fakhro clan are also criminally active in some places in Sweden, such as Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö.
Time will tell in Germany as to whether debate can be open about this criminal phenomenon, but in the end it has to be if it is to get solved. Above all, the voters need to do something about it.