German citizens with close ties to al Qaeda, phony charity schemes to pay for jihad, a male jihadi disguised in a burqa, Germany refusing to share data with the US…it’s all bad…
Der Spiegel: Part 1: German Jihad: Homegrown Terror Takes on New Dimensions
The German investigators owe much of their knowledge to the statements made last fall by three German al-Qaida members, including the two friends from Hamburg, Ahmad Sidiqi and Rami Makanesi, who disappeared in March 2009.
Makanesi managed to slip away unnoticed, taking the train to Vienna and then flying to Tehran. If he hadn’t called his wife in Hamburg from Pakistan two weeks after his disappearance, the authorities would not even have known his location at first. It wasn’t until more than a year later, in June 2010, after Makanesi wanted to return to Germany and had called the German embassy in Islamabad, that he was arrested in Pakistan, wearing a burqa as a disguise. [emphasis added]
He is now being held at Weiterstadt Prison in western Germany, awaiting his trial before a Frankfurt court. Makanesi, 25, has become a valuable source for German federal investigators. His case is typical of that of many young men from Germany who join al-Qaida.
If that isn’t enough of a reason to ban the burqa, I don’t know what is.
Der Spiegel: Part 2: ‘Embark on Jihad in Your Own Countries’
‘Thirty-Nine Ways to Support Jihad’
In the propaganda videos T. used to target adolescents in Germany, he was shown proudly pointing at the wreckage of a downed helicopter. Wearing a heavy black beard, he called upon young people in neighborhoods with large numbers of immigrants, such as Kreuzberg in Berlin and Wilhelmsburg in Hamburg, to join him in the fight against the infidels. He told them that it was up to them “to embark on jihad in your own countries.”
Fatih T. had lived in the quiet Berlin neighborhood of Lankwitz, where he had attracted little attention to himself and was considered friendly. He had an iPhone, drove a scooter and was officially a student at a technical college. He even received state educational assistance payments totaling about €600 a month. But when family members were clearing out his apartment, they found a book titled “Thirty-Nine Ways to Support Jihad.”
In Pakistan, he now went by the name of Abd al-Fattah al-Muhajir, and was the leader of a group calling itself the German Taliban Mujahideen. As awe-inspiring as the group’s name was intended to sound, it actually consisted of no more than a handful of members.
In the run-up to the 2009 national election in Germany, the German Taliban issued a video that warned of attacks in Germany and showed photos of the Brandenburg Gate, the main train station in Hamburg and the Oktoberfest in Munich. Then-Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble took the warning seriously. Fatih T. and his friends must have felt very important indeed.
Requests for Money
From Waziristan, Fatih T. directed a network of supporters, most of them in Berlin. On one occasion, he asked them to send him up to $2,000 every three months, and on another he told them to take certain Turkish-language Islamic religious courses. He also told them that he couldn’t contact them by phone, because he was staying in a country that the infidels viewed as a threat.
His family members received an email telling them that Fatih T. had a tumor in his kidney, was in a hospital in Yemen and urgently needed money for a transplant, which cost about €50,000. But the email was sent from Pakistan, not Yemen. The fighters apparently needed the money for their holy war.
Be careful about to whom you donate. Do some checking first!
Gates of Vienna: Must Germany Protect Lives of Terrorists?
After secret German intelligence was used by the United States to target terrorists in Afghanistan, the German government cut back on the secret information it had previously been passing to the CIA. At least one of the dead terrorists was a German citizen, and under German law the government agencies involved as well as the CIA may be criminally liable for his death.
Choose your allies carefully, and trust no one who does not trust you.
