Germany Thwarts Terrorist Attack, but Jihadist Threat Continues to Grow

On April 30, German police in northeastern Hesse state reportedly thwarted a terrorist attack against a bicycle race that was planned in the region on the following day (Deutsche Welle, May 1). The police arrested two suspects, a 35-year-old man of Turkish origin and his wife, and a search of their flat in Oberursel, near Frankfurt, revealed a completed pipe bomb, 100 rounds of 9-milimeter ammunition, three liters of hydrogen peroxide, a training projectile for a rocket-propelled grenade, parts of an assault rifle and assorted chemicals which could be used in bomb-making (Deutsche Welle, May 2). Their computers were also found to contain saved copies of violent Islamist videos. The police said they discovered the plot after the couple used false identities to purchase three liters of hydrogen peroxide from a shop in Frankfurt in March (purchases of over a certain amount of the chemical have to be reported to the police) (Der Spiegel, May 2). The couple are additionally believed to have links with the "Sauerland Group," a network of Islamist extremists based in western Germany, who were arrested in 2007 and subsequently jailed for plots to attack Frankfurt airport and targets associated with the U.S. military (Suddeutsche Zeitung, May 1).

The arrests underline that although Germany has never suffered a major Islamist terrorist attack, it continues to harbor a highly active hardline Islamist scene, which regularly produces militants. In early March, Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz-BfV), the main organ charged with investigating terrorist organizations and groups which may threaten the democratic order, estimated that around 680 German nationals have travelled to join jihadist groups abroad in recent years, principally in Syria and Iraq (Deutsche Welle, March 4). The BfV said that a third of these are believed to have returned to Germany, while around 85 had been killed. The BfV's president, Hans-Georg Maassen, warned that such "departures to war zones show no signs of abating." Unlike security agencies in other Western countries, such as the United States and the UK, where the state sometimes regards Salafists as potential allies against jihadism, the BfV openly regards the growth of hardline Salafism as conducive to the growth of violent jihadism. Maassen accordingly said that "the Islamist scene is growing without a pause," and assessed that, as a result, "the breeding ground for jihadis is consequently getting larger." The BfV also said that it estimated the number of Salafists in Germany as 7,300, a number that has doubled since 2011, a testament to the continuing and growing appeal of hardline Islamism to some German Muslims.

Illustrative of the BfV's concerns over the close relationship between German Salafists and jihadists is Denis Cuspert, a former rapper (a.k.a. "Deso Dogg"), who has since become one of the Islamic State's leading online propagandists under his jihadist name of "Abu Talha al-Almani." Cuspert's trajectory is common to many European jihadists, consisting of youthful involvement in crime, drugs and low-level violence, followed by a conversion to Salafist Islam in 2007 (Stern, April 15). Such cases and others, which demonstrate an individual's rapid transformation from convert to Salafist to jihadist, seem likely to reinforce the BfV's view that Salafism in Germany often effectively functions less as an antidote to extremism and more as a gateway drug, providing disenchanted Muslims with an ideological framework to rage against society, which ultimately leads some down the path to violent jihadism and the Islamic State.

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