Jihad in Germany
A terror attack in Berlin on December 19, allegedly by Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri, left 12 dead. Rarely a week has gone by in recent years without the arrest of a radical preacher or of a fighter returning from Syria or Iraq, says AFP.
This year, Germany has been shocked by a spate of attacks committed by young jihadists
- Safia S, a 15-year -old German -Moroccan girl known for singing religious songs on YouTube, stabs a police officer in the neck with a kitchen knife
- Three 16-year-olds set off a bomb in Essen that leaves three injured at a Sikh community wedding
- A 17-year-old Afghan refugee wounds five in an axe rampage on a train before police shoot him dead, Days later, a 27-yearold rejected Syrian asylum seeker blows himself up outside a music festival, wounding 15. The IS claims both July attacks
- A 12-year-old German- Iraqi boy, the youngest plotter so far, tries to set off a home-made nailbomb in Ludwigshafen
9,000
number of radical Islamists in Germany. (It was 3,800 in 2011.) About 550 considered capable of a violent attack, a list that included Amri
‘My Son, the Salafist’ The parent of one of the youths in the Sikh temple attack, Turkish-born Neriman Yama, wrote about her son’s radicalisation in the book “My Son, the Salafist”, referring to a fundamentalist branch of Islam. In it she describes how she watched her son Yusuf start watching Arabic preachers online at the age of 14, and eventually turn to violent jihadism