Monday, January 03, 2022
Dealing with jihadist children
What if terror and hatred are inherited?
Beliefs and convictions that are taught early on shape. It is the same for children of Salafist families. In Hamburg, a terrorist attack by a second generation suspect can barely be prevented. Dealing with it is a problem for experts and security authorities.
Those who are brought up to hate supposedly “infidels” as a child do not shake off the jihadist ideology so easily later. The arrest of a 20-year-old second-generation terror suspect in Hamburg, which was publicly announced a few days ago, highlights a problem that is preoccupying security authorities and experts on deradicalization – also with a view to the children of women returnees from the former territory of the terrorist militia Islamic State (IS ). The son of a well-known radical Islamist is said to have prepared an attack in Germany. The young man is said to have tried to buy a pistol, ammunition and a hand grenade.
During a search of a relative’s home that he was using, investigators found chemicals used to build an explosive device. The German-Moroccan from Hamburg, who was arrested in August, has, so much is certain, came into contact with violent Salafism at an early age. His father, who emigrated to Morocco in 2016, once went in and out of the Al-Quds mosque in Hamburg, which was later closed. Later he was one of the visitors to 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 piloted one of the aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York in 2001.
The Hanseatic Higher Regional Court had sentenced el Motassadeq to 15 years imprisonment for complicity in murder in at least 246 cases and membership in a terrorist organization. He was deported to Morocco in 2019, a few weeks before the end of his regular prison term.
Safia S., who stabbed a police officer in Hanover Central Station with a kitchen knife at the beginning of 2016 – at the time she was 15 years old – is known that as a child she was sent to a Salafist-dominated mosque for Islamic classes. The Higher Regional Court in Celle has sentenced her to a six-year youth sentence for attempted murder with dangerous bodily harm and support for a foreign terrorist organization. The Federal Court of Justice rejected an appeal against the decision in 2018.
Parent ideologies
It is not always clear to what extent parental influences play a role in violent Islamists. “Something like this is known in individual cases,” say the security authorities. Experts who deal intensively with the biographies of terror suspects will probably also take a closer look at the life of the young hamburger, who is now in custody. In any case, it is known that the arrested person 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 will turn away from the ideology of their parents. This is shown by the unusual case of a German whose father was on the board of the “German-speaking Islamic Circle Hildesheim”, which was banned in 2017. The son of a Palestinian provided the Jordanian secret service with information about the mosque frequented by IS supporters, as the Thuringian Higher Regional Court later found. The then 34-year-old was sentenced to a suspended sentence in 2019 for being a secret service agent.
The role of the protection of the constitution
There is no systematic observation of the children of radical Islamists, for example those who are classified by the police as so-called threats. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution only looks at the activities of the descendants of these Salafists when they themselves are conspicuous as Islamists. And even then, the domestic intelligence service’s ability to store information is very limited if it involves minors. The prerequisite for this are “factual indications” that he or she is planning a particularly serious crime that, for example, endangers the democratic constitutional state.
In addition, the information on suspected extremists from this age group cannot be found with a normal database query. That means that the secret service employees must already know that they exist and where they have been stored. For young people between the ages of 14 and 17, special deletion periods also apply when they are stored.
Data storage also with children?
In 2016, the coalition of the Union and the SPD lowered the age limit for storing data from 16 to 14 years. Three years later, the then Federal Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer, wanted to abolish it entirely. The SPD, which is now his successor in office with Nancy Faeser, was against it. The opponents of a lowering of the minimum age limit say: Anyone who ends up on the radar of the protection of the Constitution through the indoctrination of their parents or their own aberrations in childhood should therefore not have any disadvantages later. For example at the immigration authorities. Or when he is an adult applying for a job that requires a safety exam.
The Federal Office nevertheless considered the elimination of the age restriction in 2019 to be justifiable and necessary. Also because of the expected return of children whose “jihadist parents” had joined IS in Iraq or Syria. Some of them have witnessed atrocities first hand. Some of them were still exposed to Salafist indoctrination in refugee camps after the terrorists were driven out.
According to the federal government, twelve mothers and 42 children – including some orphans – were brought to Germany from camps in northeast Syria between August 2019 and October 2021. Other former IS supporters came back to Germany with their children by other means.