Hamburg Alert For Return of `Jihadists' as Sept. 11 Mosque Shut
Hamburg Alert For Return of ‘Jihadists’ as Mosque Shut
Fabian Bimmer/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers guard the entrance of the Taiba mosque, on the second floor, in Hamburg, August 9.
Police officers guard the entrance of the Taiba mosque, on the second floor, in Hamburg, August 9. Photographer: Fabian Bimmer/AFP/Getty Images
In the downtown St. Georg neighborhood of Hamburg, where Arabic, Turkish and African languages dominate street chatter, a police seal on the steel gate to the Taiba mosque declares the premises off-limits.
It has been shut for three weeks after a raid on Aug. 9 by German security officials, who said the mosque, which came to prominence after Sept. 11, 2001, as a haunt of al-Qaeda operatives, has again become a “meeting place for jihadists.” Some local Muslims say the radicals were driven underground.
“I know a lot of older people who told their children not to go there,” Salem, dressed in a white ankle-length robe and skullcap, said outside the al-Nour mosque in the same district. “I worry that they’ll come to us now.”
Nine years after the terrorist attacks on the U.S., Hamburg security services say Islamic extremists are once more recruiting in the city that was home to three of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots. In their sights are western forces in Afghanistan, where the battle against the Taliban that began in October 2001 is now the longest war in American history.
Germany’s 4,590 soldiers are the third-largest contingent in Afghanistan after U.S. and British forces. Authorities in 2007 broke up a cell of Islamic extremists who prosecutors said had planned to bomb American targets in Germany.
The “major problem” is caused by young Islamists traveling to Pakistan for training and then returning home to the West, often without making it to Afghanistan, said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Lingering Issue
“It’s a significant counter-terrorism issue, not because the numbers are high but because they have the training and the motivation,” Cordesman said by telephone. “Germany has done reasonably well” in thwarting attacks, he said. “But this is an issue that isn’t going to go away.”
The group running the mosque, based in a building squeezed between a Vietnamese restaurant and a health club, was banned after turning young men into “religious fanatics,” the Hamburg municipality said in a statement on the day of the police raid. “Jihadists” were convening at the mosque, the statement said.
Calls to the mosque’s listed phone number went unanswered.
Salem said he is concerned that people from the mosque may prey on youths who don’t have a firm knowledge of their religion. He asked for his last name to be omitted because of fear he would “get in trouble” with other Muslims in the city.
Biggest Port
Hamburg is Germany’s second-biggest city after Berlin and its biggest port. The city-state handles 1 million tons of goods going to and from markets in Asia, Africa and the U.S. each week and has attracted immigrants since medieval times.
Today, the Hamburg area is the richest of Germany’s 16 states, supporting a population of 1.8 million. Yet it has an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent, above the national average of 7.6 percent. About 487,000 people, or 28 percent, have non- German roots, with Turks making up the largest group. That compares with just below 20 percent nationally, according to 2009 Federal Statistics Office data.
That diversity provided cover for Mohamed Atta and other al-Qaeda members as they plotted the attacks on New York and Washington. Atta, the lead hijacker, and two other suicide pilots frequented the Taiba mosque, previously known as al-Quds and renamed in 2008 by the Taiba Arab-German Culture Association, the group now banned by Hamburg authorities.
Taiba Protagonist
A “leading protagonist” at Taiba was Mamoun Darkazanli, a German-Syrian dual national who knew Atta and is accused of being al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s contact in Germany, according to German and Spanish authorities.
Indicted on terrorism charges in Spain in 2003, Darkazanli avoided extradition when a German court threw out his European Union arrest warrant in 2005 on civil rights grounds. His apartment in Hamburg also was raided on Aug. 9, according to Heino Vahldieck, Hamburg’s top anti-terror official.
Eleven followers of the banned group left for the Pakistani-Afghan border area in March 2009, Vahldieck said. Several members were captured by Pakistan and deported to Germany, and others are in Pakistani or U.S. custody, he said.
Taiba “is the place in the city that’s most closely connected with the issue of global jihad,” Vahldieck said in an interview. Hamburg has a special responsibility to be vigilant on extremism because of its role as a staging post for the Sept. 11 attacks, and the operation to shut down Taiba “is part of the complex architecture of defending against terrorism.”
Political Flames
Any clampdown on extremism also risks fanning political flames, according to Jeffrey Murer, a research fellow with the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland.
Mosques are “much more loath” to tolerate extremists after Sept. 11, with community organizations “much more sensitive to recruitment in their midst,” said Murer. Still, Afghanistan is “still extremely important” as a rallying cry to young Muslims in the West, he said.
In Hamburg, Taiba holds itself apart, according to Ahmet Yazici, deputy head of the Alliance of Islamic Community in Northern Germany, a group that denounces violence.
“These people don’t even talk to us,” Yazici said in an Aug. 13 interview. “They call us infidels.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Tony Czuczka in Berlin at aczuczka@bloomberg.net
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