A.On the occasion of the anniversary of the terrorist attack on the Christmas market on Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz, the chairman of the Conference of Interior Ministers (IMK), Thomas Strobl (CDU), called for the German security authorities to be strengthened in the fight against Islamist terrorism. “Islamist terrorism still poses a serious global threat,” said the Baden-Württemberg interior minister to the newspapers of the Funke media group. “Our primary goal must be to prevent a terrorist attack.”
“To this end, the security authorities must be as materially and personally as possible and have the necessary legal framework for their effective action – even in the run-up to an impending attack -“, Strobl told the newspapers.
“Grossly negligent in terms of security policy”
The CDU politician accused the new traffic light coalition of neglecting the protection of the population against Islamist terrorism. “Our security authorities are anything but strengthened,” said Strobl with regard to the coalition agreement. The security of the people, above all the fight against Islamist terrorism, is “at least not prioritized, not very specific, without substance”. The coalition is said to be “grossly negligent in terms of security policy.”
According to a study by the CDU-affiliated Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, the Islamist terrorist threat to Germany has decreased since the demise of the jihadist militia “Islamic State” (IS), but has by no means been averted. “Since 2017, the number of attacks and attack plans has fallen sharply,” stated the study’s author, Guido Steinberg, as reported by the Funke newspapers.
“Perhaps the greatest threat to Germany continues to come from Syria,” he wrote. This is mainly due to the fact that IS has been gaining strength there and in Iraq since 2019.
Steinberg described Germany’s attitude to largely leaving the fight against terrorism to the USA as “worrying”. Former US President Donald Trump threatened to simply release European IS fighters if they were not taken back from their countries of origin. For example, Germany is refusing to take back German IS fighters who are imprisoned in Syria.
Outsourcing involves risks
Although under the new US President Joe Biden it is not to be expected that such a threat will be carried out, the German strategy is nevertheless dangerous, warned Steinberg: In the long term it is a risk to “outsource” large parts of the German fight against terrorism to the USA without providing “significant consideration”.
In the attack on Breitscheidplatz on December 19, 2016, the assassin Anis Amri killed eleven people by driving them over with a truck. He had previously killed the Polish driver of the truck he had stolen. The RBB recently reported that an IS official from Iraq is said to have commissioned the attack.
.
#Interior #Ministers #Conference #Strobl #arm #fight #Islamism