Intelligence officials in Hamburg, Germany, acknowledge that 2,000 residents of the wealthy port city embrace radical Islamic ideology. They concede that 45 of those citizens are supporters of al-Qaeda and global jihad, and that others have traveled to Pakistan for terrorist training.
However, officials there were annoyed last week when the US, the UK and France issued travel alerts warning of possible terror attacks in Europe.
“There is no dissent that we face an intense, abstract danger,” said an official with the Hamburg state intelligence service, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secretive nature of his work.
However, officials said there was no evidence of a concrete threat, a point of emphasis that has led to a significant gap between Germany and its allies.
While the other countries argued it was best to give travelers an alert, no matter how vague, that approach was widely criticized in Germany as counterproductive, playing right into the hands of terrorists.
“Keeping a whole population under threat, this leads to nothing,” said Elke Hoff, a member of the defense committee of the Bundestag. “This puts the terrorists in some kind of limelight, which they want to achieve by every means.”
The prevailing sentiment was that the US issued its warning for political purposes, perhaps an effort to help preserve support for the war in Afghanistan or to somehow aid US President Barack Obama with next month’s elections. The US dismissed those notions as ridiculous.
However, for all of the criticism of the alert, officials found themselves acknowledging their own concerns about a homegrown threat. German officials described what has become apparent globally, where al-Qaeda’s leadership and organizational abilities have been degraded to the point that it can do little more than exhort the faithful to carry out acts of terrorism at home on their own.
“That’s what we all experience in America and in other countries and also here, that this phenomenon of the homegrown terrorist increases rapidly,” the Hamburg intelligence official said. “This is an extremism which grows right here. The recruiting, the radicalization happens right here, not in other countries.”
Hoping to put the recent news in some context, officials issued statistics to support their contention that the problem was limited. The federal security services said that over the past two decades, about 215 citizens or legal residents of Germany received paramilitary training in terrorist camps, that 65 completed the training and that of the total group, about 105 are in Germany, including 15 in prison.
“No one should doubt that Germany is a target for terrorists, but on the other had there are no concrete, immediate attack plans that we are aware of,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said on the radio after the reports of the drone killings.
However, officials also acknowledged that those numbers shed little light, if any, on the rising threat that someone living in Germany — unknown to the security services — will strike.
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