Europe wonders whether to bring back children raised under Islamic State

2019/02/19 Leave a comment

Not unique to Europe.

Hard to feel any sympathy for the mothers who went to fight for the ISIS. The children are another matter but the integration challenges, with or without their mothers, will be significant:

The children’s voices crackled through the phone and into Fatiha’s gray-walled living room.

“When are we going to grandma’s?” one implored in the background, and then into the phone: “Are you coming to get us?”

In the hallway, six coat hooks were fixed in a row at child’s height. A backpack hung on each one. Up a steep stairway, sheets with characters from Pixar’s “Cars” were carefully tucked into bunk beds, awaiting the children’s return.

But Fatiha, a Belgian whose grandparents emigrated from Morocco, didn’t know when her six grandchildren — who range in age from 10 months to 7 years – would be back. They are among the hundreds of children born to European citizens who went to fight for the Islamic State. Now that the caliphate has collapsed, and the planned U.S. withdrawal has compounded regional instability, grandparents across Europe are pushing to save children whom in some cases they’ve seen only in photos, looking up at them from the dusty desert floor.

“We’re waiting for them, everything is ready for them,” Fatiha, 46, said in an interview at her home outside Antwerp, in a bucolic village where backyards give way to hayfields. The children’s fathers are dead, and their mothers – Fatiha’s daughter and daughter-in-law – would face prison sentences if they return to Belgium. So Fatiha has prepared to care for the children herself. To protect her grandchildren, she spoke on the condition that her last name not be published.

For Belgium, France and other countries that saw some of their nationals gravitate toward Islamic State territory as it expanded across Syria and Iraq, the plight of children who have claims to citizenship has ignited questions that would test the most Solomonic of judges.

Governments are grappling with how much responsibility they bear for the safety of these small citizens, most of them younger than 6, in a region where fresh conflict could erupt. Courts are weighing whether the rights of the children extend to returning with their Islamic State parents. And a bitter public debate is underway about whether grandparents whose own children ran away to the Islamic State can be trusted to raise a new generation differently.

The Kurdish authorities who control the territory in northeastern Syria where many of these families ended up estimate they have more than 1,300 children in their refugee and prison camps. Russia repatriated 27 children last week. France is considering bringing back more than 100 fighters – who would face trial – and their families. But until now, most governments have calculated that the political downside of retrieving parents who may pose security risks outweighs any need to bring back the children.

In Fatiha’s case, a judge ruled that Belgium must repatriate her six grandchildren, along with her daughter and her daughter-in-law – Belgian citizens who joined the Islamic State and now want to come back. The two women were convicted in absentia of joining a terrorist organization and would each face a five-year prison sentence upon their arrival on Belgian soil. But the judge ruled that bringing the children home and leaving their mothers in Syria would violate the children’s human rights.

The Dec. 26 ruling has spurred a furious response from Belgian leaders, and the government plans to appeal in court on Wednesday. Authorities expect whatever precedent is set to affect decisions about other Islamic State families. At least 22 Belgian children are in Syrian camps, and more than 160 are believed to be in the conflict zone.

The most vociferous objections relate to the return of the parents.

“We won’t punish young children for their parents’ misdeeds,” Belgium’s migration secretary, Maggie De Block, said in a statement last month. “They have not chosen the Islamic State. That is why we want to make efforts to bring them back to our country. For the parents, the situation is different. They themselves have deliberately chosen to turn their backs on our country and even to fight against it. Repeatedly.

“Solidarity has its limits,” she said. “The freedom you enjoy in our country to make your own decisions also means you bear responsibility for the consequences.”

Spokesmen for De Block, the justice ministry and Belgium’s prime minister all declined to comment for this report. They would not confirm whether the government was paying the judge’s prescribed penalty of 5,000 euros per child per day if they weren’t returned by Feb. 4.

Even for the children, Belgian sympathy goes only so far. Many people are anxious. Belgium contributed the largest number of Islamic State fighters to Syria per capita of any European Union nation, and the country remains scarred by the attacks of 2016, when Belgian citizens with Islamic State connections targeted Brussels with deadly bombings. Discussions on talk shows and in editorial pages have stoked fear about what the children may have learned from their parents or from Islamic State training camps, which targeted children as young as 6 for indoctrination – although little evidence exists that any of the Belgians were exposed.

Belgium needs to protect “these children as well as our children, and to protect the parents of our children,” said Nadia Sminate, a lawmaker in the regional parliament for the Dutch-speaking north of Belgium who has been a vocal critic of plans to bring back the children. “These children have been raised with different values and norms than our children. We don’t have to be silly about that. They’ve seen the cruelest things in the world.”

When Fatiha needs to cheer herself up, she plays a video her daughter sent last summer of her grandchildren raucously singing “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” in Dutch – their first and only language.

Her days are a blur of frustration. A visit from the police, interviewing her yet again to determine whether she would raise the grandchildren in a radicalized home. A phone call with her lawyer, who is battling the Belgian government to carry out the judge’s order. A rattling train trip to Brussels alongside other grandmothers who are pushing policymakers to repatriate their toddlers. An anxious internet search of prison conditions in Deir Ezzour, Syria, where she was worried her daughter, daughter-in-law and grandchildren had been taken after they dropped out of contact for more than two weeks last month.

When they resurfaced, they reported that Kurdish authorities had blindfolded them and transferred them not to Deir Ezzour, but to a more brutal camp than they’d been in previously. One of Fatiha’s grandsons has chronic diarrhea, and now he has only a single pair of pants, his mother said. Another has asthma, but no medicine.

“Everything keeps getting worse,” Fatiha’s daughter, Bouchra Abouallal, 25, said in an interview with The Washington Post via a messaging service. “I keep telling the children, ‘Don’t be afraid. Nothing is going to happen.’ But they’re not stupid anymore.”

After the December court order, “we told our children, ‘We’re almost home. We’ll be there in a month,’ ” Abouallal said, her voice cracking.

A boy’s voice interrupted. “Why are you crying?”

“It’s now they who are calming me down, not the other way around,” Abouallal told The Post.

By Fatiha’s account, her family’s problems started with her 2009 divorce from her children’s father, which sent them searching elsewhere for support.

The family had worn its faith lightly. Fatiha said they practiced “modern Islam.” But her eldest son, Noureddine Abouallal, fell in with an Antwerp group called Sharia4Belgium — which would later be connected to 2015 and 2016 terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. Noureddine Abouallal shaved his head and grew a beard. He and his wife — Tatiana Wielandt, who converted to Islam to marry him in 2010 — marked their son’s birth with an announcement that included images of a fighter and a gun.

Bouchra Abouallal and her husband also joined Sharia4Belgium.

In 2013, when eager adherents of jihadism were streaming toward the fighting, the two couples went with their babies to Syria. The men were killed within a year. Abouallal and Wielandt – each pregnant with her dead husband’s child, and each with an older son in tow – returned to Belgium in 2014. The state didn’t seek to prosecute them then.

Fatiha said she was furious that they had run away, but she let them back in her life. Abouallal and Wielandt crammed into a bunk bed. Two baby boys were born. Their toddler sons settled in at a school two doors down.

Once, at a backyard barbecue, one grandson dived under a table as a plane flew overhead – perhaps a reaction ingrained from bombings. But otherwise the boys showed little evidence of what they had been through, Fatiha said.

Then, one day in 2015, they all disappeared, leaving Fatiha with a house full of toys and a child-size Nutella handprint on the door to the backyard.

“I felt like I was stabbed in my back. I felt like I didn’t want to have anything to do with them,” she said. She left the handprint.

In the end, she said, she decided it was better to keep in touch. The young women made it with their children to the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa. They remarried, but their second husbands were killed around the time Wielandt gave birth to her third child. After Western forces bombarded the city into submission in late 2017, they fled into Kurdish-controlled territory and eventually to the al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria.

Her daughter and daughter-in-law ask Fatiha for reminders about what Belgian primary schools teach, so they can try to replicate the lessons. In video clips, the kids show off their somersaults and tumbling. Recently, Abouallal sent a video of Fatiha’s newest granddaughter, born last April, wearing her first headband and plucking at the unfamiliar white elastic as it slipped over her eyes.

“I told them I want to see everything as they grow up,” Fatiha said. “I don’t want to miss a thing.”

But as the Belgian government stalls, and as the security situation in Syria becomes increasingly uncertain, Fatiha and the other grandmothers are growing embittered.

Nabila Mazouz — whose son was caught at the airport as he tried to make his way to Syria – started a support group called Mothers’ Jihad to help fight for the return of Belgians who spent time in the caliphate.

“I understand the government. I understand the security issues,” Mazouz said. “But I guarantee they’re going to come back, and if they come back in 15 to 20 years, what kind of mood are they going to come back in?”

She said that after being repeatedly spurned by Belgian authorities, she now better understands her son’s disaffection.

“I never asked myself, ‘Am I Moroccan or Belgian?’ I said I was Belgian,” she said. “I was born here. I work here. I pay my taxes here. But now I ask myself. Now the parents understand the perspective of the young adults.”

Advocates for the children in Syria have been targeted with bile.

“Normally, everybody likes what we do,” said Heidi De Pauw, the director of Child Focus, a Belgian organization that is modeled on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States. But for pressing Belgian authorities on this case, she has received death threats and been told that the children should be “drowned like kittens.”

De Pauw and others say the children should not be condemned because their parents made bad decisions.

One psychologist who traveled to Syria in October to assess Belgian children in the camps, including Fatiha’s grandchildren, said despite everything they have been through, their play and development were relatively normal.

“We were really surprised about how these children were doing,” said Gerrit Loots, a child psychologist at the Free University of Brussels. “Once these children have adapted, they can go to school, they can be with others.”

Loots said his greatest concern was how attached the children were to their mothers. “They’ve never spent a day apart,” he noted.

He said taking the children back to Belgium without their mothers would be “psychologically disastrous.” Bringing them all back together, even assuming the mothers go straight to prison, would be easier to manage, Loots concluded.

The mothers say they want to return, but they are ready to stay behind in Syria if that’s the cost of getting their children back to Belgium and safety.

“I have no problem with that,” Abouallal said. “I just want my children to have a secure life, and have a normal life, and that they don’t punish them for the mistakes we’ve made.”

Fatiha sucked in her breath, then dabbed a tear, as her daughter described conditions in their new camp.

“Try to keep them busy,” Fatiha urged her daughter. “Tell them a story.”

“I love you,” the grandmother told them all, before she hung up the phone and slumped into her couch.

Source: Europe wonders whether to bring back children raised under Islamic State

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The English Voice of ISIS Comes Out of the Shadows

2019/02/18 Leave a comment

The Canadian connection. No rush for consular assistance:

More than four years ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation appealed to the public to help identify the narrator in one of the Islamic State’s best-known videos, showing captured Syrian soldiers digging their own graves and then being shot in the head.

Speaking fluent English with a North American accent, the man would go on to narrate countless other videos and radio broadcasts by the Islamic State, serving as the terrorist group’s faceless evangelist to Americans and other English speakers seeking to learn about its toxic ideology.

Now a 35-year-old Canadian citizen, who studied at a college in Toronto and once worked in information technology at a company contracted by IBM, says he is the anonymous narrator.

That man, Mohammed Khalifa captured in Syria last month by an American-backed militia, spoke in his first interview about being the voice of the 2014 video, known as “Flames of War.” He described himself as a rank-and-file employee of the Islamic State’s Ministry of Media, the unit responsible for publicizing such brutal footage as the beheading of the American journalist James Foley and the burning of a Jordanian pilot.

“No, I don’t regret it,” Mr. Khalifa said from a prison in northeastern Syria. “I was asked the same thing by my interrogators, and I told them the same thing.”

A thin, diminutive man who occasionally broke into a grin during the hourslong conversation with The New York Times, Mr. Khalifa said he immigrated as a child from Saudi Arabia to Toronto, where he learned to speak much like a native-born Canadian. He said he had studied computer systems technology and worked for a contracting company before leaving for Syria — drawn to the battlefield by watching YouTube.

Terrorism experts say it is hard to overstate the role his effortless English narration played in bringing the terrorist group’s propaganda to English speakers and luring some of them to its cause.

Mr. Khalifa has admitted to narrating “Flames of War,” a 2014 propaganda video showing the execution of Syrian prisoners.CreditSITE Intelligence Group

“His voice is the most recognizable English-speaking voice to have ever appeared in Islamic State propaganda,” said Charlie Winter, a senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London.

To verify Mr. Khalifa’s claim, The Times asked three audio-forensic experts to compare the anonymous voice on the “Flames of War” video with a televised statement by Mr. Khalifa aired in Syria shortly after his capture. Though such analyses are not foolproof, all three experts concluded it was highly likely that Mr. Khalifa was the narrator.

It is “134 times more likely that the unknown speaker” is Mr. Khalifa than someone else, Catalin Grigoras and Jeff M. Smith wrote in a report prepared for The Times. Both are forensic audio specialists at the University of Colorado’s National Center for Media Forensics.

Robert C. Maher, a voice recognition expert at Montana State University in Bozeman, created a spectrogram comparing the pronunciation of specific words in the two audio clips, concluding that “the speech tone, pitch, cadence and pronunciation is the same in these examples.”

Later, a U.S. official briefed on the matter confirmed to The Times that Mr. Khalifa was indeed the narrator.

The release of the “Flames of War” video on Sept. 19, 2014, marked a turning point for ISIS, coming less than three months after the founding of the group’s caliphate. Until then, the group had published shorter, less ambitious videos.

Filmed in part by an ISIS fighter equipped with a GoPro camera, the 55-minute video was the first to create an immersive experience, showing a soldier digging a trench before an operation, conducting surveillance and then engaging and overrunning the enemy. Because it was narrated in English, it became a touchstone for recruits from Australia, Britain and North America, according to Mr. Winter.

For Mr. Khalifa it was the beginning of a prolific career. The sum of his narration work — believed to include dozens of audio and video clips — serves as a sampling of the Islamic State’s most influential English-language propaganda.

“He is a symbol — the voice coming out of ISIS, speaking to the English-speaking world, for the better part of the last four to five years,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, a prominent researcher in Toronto who studies radicalization in Canada.

Mr. Khalifa is now among hundreds of ISIS fighters from approximately 50 countries who are locked in prisons in northern Syria. Thousands of their wives and children are being held in detention camps, free to move among the tents but unable to leave. Mr. Khalifa said he had married in the caliphate and had two children, though it was unclear where they were now.

Canada is one of many countries that have been reluctant to take back their citizens, worried that battlefield evidence may be deemed inadmissible in court, making it difficult to secure prosecutions.

A month after his capture, Mr. Khalifa’s future was uncertain. He said he had not received a visit from Canadian authorities or been offered consular help. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police declined to comment on his detention, as did the Canadian foreign ministry. The F.B.I. also declined to comment.

Mr. Amarasingam, the Toronto researcher, was among the first to take an interest in the unnamed narrator’s possible Canadian connection, after noticing the distinct accent of the speaker in an ISIS video boasting about the 2015 attacks in Paris. “I thought, this guy sounds like people I grew up with,” Mr. Amarasingam said.

Later, on a research trip to Syria, Mr. Amarasingam and the journalist Stewart Bell were given access to a Canadian fighter captured nine months ago. The combatant, Muhammed Ali, said he had met and befriended the narrator, describing him as a Canadian of African descent who used the nom de guerre Abu Ridwan.

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Ali agreed to listen to an audio recording of the recently captured Mr. Khalifa. “That’s him,” he exclaimed. Mr. Ali said Mr. Khalifa’s identity as the narrator was not widely known in the caliphate. “That’s not something he shares,” Mr. Ali said. “But once you speak to him, it’s obvious.”

In a two-minute televised statement after being captured by the Syrian Democratic Forces, Mr. Khalifa identified himself as an ISIS fighter and gave his name as Mohammed Abdullah Mohammed, which follows the Arab naming convention of his first name followed by his father’s and grandfather’s names. He admitted to attacking the local Kurdish militia but made no mention of his role as the narrator.

The brief statement was enough for analysts to recognize the voice as that of the narrator, though officials with the militia group said Mr. Khalifa initially denied his role.

In the interview with The Times, Mr. Khalifa spoke in the presence of two Kurdish prison officials, who recorded the exchange but did not interfere. He clarified that his legal name was Mohammed Khalifa, a detail confirmed by Mr. Amarasingam, who has been in touch with one of his childhood friends in Canada. Mr. Khalifa downplayed his significance in the Islamic State and insisted that he had not appeared in any execution videos beyond providing the voice-over narration, a claim that could not be immediately verified since most executioners wore masks.

He said he was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to parents of Ethiopian descent, earned a diploma in computer systems technology from Seneca College in Toronto and led an unremarkable work life as an information technology specialist, including for Kelly Services, an IBM contractor. IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reached by phone, Kelly Services confirmed that a Mohammed Khalifa was contracted by the company from May 2009 to April 2010 in Markham, Ontario. Seneca College declined to comment.

By 2013, Mr. Khalifa was listening to online lectures by the Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki. He said they convinced him of the necessity of jihad. But it was a YouTube video, not unlike the ones he would later narrate, that helped him make the leap. It showed a group of British fighters speaking English on the front line in Syria, he said, giving him the sense that he could fit in.

Mr. Khalifa said he crossed into Syria in 2013 and initially joined the Muhajireen wal Ansar Brigade led by Omar al-Shishani, a Georgian militant who would become the Islamic State’s minister of war. The brigade pledged allegiance to ISIS in late 2013, and before the caliphate was declared in 2014, Mr. Khalifa said he had already begun working for the group’s media ministry, among the most crucial organs of the terrorist state.

He said he was initially employed as a translator, helping render Arabic copy into English, before being asked to work as a narrator. Asked which videos he worked on, he initially demurred, before quietly answering, “Like ‘Flames of War.’”

The media unit, he said, was led by Abu Muhammad al-Furqan, an Iraqi confidante of the Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The media chief, killed in an airstrike in 2016, was intimately involved in vetting the group’s work, reviewing scripts and requesting edits, Mr. Khalifa said.

The chief insisted that the execution videos feature a diversity of killers, so no single participant rose in prominence above others. A camera team roamed the caliphate scouting for the ideal executioners, Mr. Khalifa said. They were especially keen to find people from different nationalities to underscore the group’s global reach.

“The intention was to not make anyone into a celebrity,” Mr. Khalifa said.

The team staged the executions, capturing the scene using still cameras, GoPros and drones, and then delivered the raw footage on an SD card to the media unit’s office, inside a villa on the Euphrates 12 miles outside Raqqa, Syria.

There, he said, an editing team pored over the footage, storyboarding the narrative arc and adding sound effects and narration.

Mr. Khalifa claimed that he had had no role in filming or carrying out the scenes he narrated, which included deploying underwater cameras to capture the staged drowning of prisoners.

“I was just the voice,” Mr. Khalifa said, insisting that his work was confined to the studio.

He said he was chosen for that role by an Australian supervisor who went by the name of Abu Abdullah.

“He would give me a text, like a script, and I would review it for mistakes, and then we would record,” he said. “He would then review it and see if there was anything that he would like me to place emphasis on.”

At first, Mr. Khalifa said, the audio was recorded in a professional studio, with walls made of foam to absorb ambient sound. They used the software Magix Samplitude to edit the sound, and the finished productions were broadcast through a portable satellite dish.

But that all changed with American airstrikes in late 2014, Mr. Khalifa said. They had to relocate to urban centers starting with Raqqa, moving from house to house, aware that the proximity to civilians helped protect them.

As the Islamic State’s territory shrank, the media team was pushed out of Raqqa, but remained active, carrying the satellite dish with them, he said. They worried that the dish might give them away, but they continued transmitting nonetheless. In the final weeks before his capture, Mr. Khalifa estimated, there were at least 20 media operatives in the group’s last pocket in Syria, which has since been reduced to a tiny patch of land.

“Guys I knew agreed to work out of their homes,” he said. “They still took the risk.”

By the time he was apprehended last month, Mr. Khalifa said he had stopped working for the media unit and had picked up a Kalashnikov rifle to defend the Islamic State. Officials with the Syrian Democratic Forces said he had tried to attack their position. Mr. Khalifa said he had approached a villa, entering from below while soldiers were on an upper floor.

After a protracted gunfight, he said, he was bleeding and alone. The videos he had narrated were full of bravado, his voice representing a group that had vowed never to give up. But after more than six defiant years in the battle zone, Mr. Khalifa said, he did something that he never thought possible.

“I was exhausted. My ammo was gone,” he said. “They kept calling on me to surrender, and so I threw down my weapon.”

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Gurski: What if Canada stopped preventing violent extremism or countering violent extremism: would it make a difference?

2019/02/12 Leave a comment

My friend Phil Gurski asks some needed questions.

While attending a briefing by the Montreal-based Centre de prévention de la radicalisation menant à la violence, the glossiness of their material made me wonder whether this was more of a communications initiative than substance:

We in Canada have terrorism on the brain. On any given day, there’s at least one, and, unfortunately, usually far more than one, terrorist act somewhere  on this planet. Death and destruction executed by idiots who see the use of violence as God’s will or a legitimate way to effect change in favour of one cause or another will always be with us.

When it comes to Canada, however, there is a disproportionate fear of terrorism here at home. Statistics do not support this fear: far from it actually. And yet the conviction that terrorism is a larger threat than it really is can and does affect Canadians’ views on matters ranging from immigration to foreign policy. One other area is the creation of a national program to prevent the radicalization to violence that is the sine qua non of terrorism.

My challenge is: do we need to spend this money on a problem that is far smaller than perceived?  In at least one case, a centre that seeks to prevent radicalization  is unsure whether some of its funding will continue.  Would we miss it if these programs disappeared?

Allow me to explain. According to StatsCan, in 2017 there were 163 gang-related murders in Canada (out of a total of 660 total homicides or a little less than one quarter). To combat gangs and help prevent youth from joining, the National Crime Prevention Centre at Public Safety Canada (PSC) spent a little under $31-million over an unspecified five-year period.

Strikingly, PSC is allotting slightly more money ($35-million) over an identical time period for countering violent extremism (CVE). So, how many people were killed by violent extremists (i.e. terrorists) in Canada in 2017? Zero. Or six if you want to label the shooting at a mosque in Québec City a terrorist act (or at minimum an act of hate, which I will accept may be an example of violent extremism, unlike garden variety murder). How many terrorism-related deaths in 2016? Zero (vs. 141 gang-related). How many in 2015? Zero (versus 98 gang-related). Do you see the pattern here? Sure we can add in the so-called “foreign fighters” but the numbers are still minimal.

I submit to you that if the Canadian government were to stop ALL funding for CVE tomorrow, not only would Canadians not notice anything, but it is far from clear that the sudden lack of research and prevention would lead to a single successful radicalization-to-violence process and possible terrorism. Yes, a small number of Canadians will always adopt violent extremist ideas and an even smaller number will go on to commit an act of terrorism here or outside Canada. Some attacks will be stopped thanks to the efforts of CSIS, the RCMP, and their partners, by the way.

I am starting to think that the money and focus on violent radicalization and its prevention is unnecessary, in part because the problem is too small to warrant special attention. No, I do not deny the impact of successful attacks: in fact, the belief that we needed to do something and do it now stemmed to a large extent from the events of October 2014, when two home-grown Islamist terrorists killed two military officers two days apart just outside Montreal and right in the centre of Ottawa. There is nothing like having a gunman firing wildly down the hall from where the prime minister was at a caucus meeting in Centre Block to get governments to develop new programs.

It is also far from clear that any of the programs will make any difference in large part because measuring the effectiveness of such efforts is devilishly difficult. I concede that they are most likely not making matters worse, but it is next to impossible to determine that any one program is preventing any one person from thinking terrorism is a good idea.

Please note that I am not advocating ignoring this issue, as tiny as it is. The way I see it, our response in Canada should be two-fold. At one end, it is the job of CSIS and the RCMP to identify, investigate, and neutralize those seeking to plan and execute attacks. At the other end, I am confident that already existing programs in school and civil society that seek to turn people away from gangs and other dangerous anti-social acts can be easily tweaked to deal with the rare cases of violent radicalization. This does not need special, tailor-made funding or resources. In countries where this scourge is several orders of magnitude larger, there probably is a need for a special effort.

I am fairly certain that my position will make me enemies, especially among those parties with vested interests in CVE funding. But as a taxpayer, I want my government to be involved where it needs to be and not try to be all things to all people. Developing expensive programs for all but non-existent problems makes little sense to me.

Source: What if Canada stopped preventing violent extremism or countering violent extremism: would it make a difference?

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Gurski: Linking immigration and terrorism is wrong, in Canada and elsewhere

2018/11/14 Leave a comment

Good column by Gurski:

I never knew my maternal grandfather. He emigrated to Canada in the early part of the 20th century from western Ukraine (or eastern Poland, the details on that are fuzzy) and settled in Montreal where he worked at the CPR’s Angus workshops, along with a great many other immigrants, I imagine. He married and had four children, including my mother, and toughed it out during the Great Depression. He died in the mid-1940s.

I seldom think of him but his memory came back to me last week when I read of a new documentary, That Never Happened, by Saskatoon native Ryan Boyko, which premiered at Ottawa’s Bytowne Cinema among other venues. The film deals with the internment of thousands of Ukrainian immigrants in camps in remote areas of Canada from 1914-1920. These men were seen as citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with which we were at war, and hence they were viewed as enemies of the state. My grandfather is believed to have been one of those internees at the Spirit Lake detention site in northern Quebec (I have a copy of my grandfather’s passport which says he was tied to the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

The round-up of thousands of Ukrainian immigrants, and the monitoring of tens of thousands more, was the product of fear: fear of the other. In fairness, I suppose, Canada was at war and those were different times, but fear is still largely irrational and often unjustified. Nor has it gone away – as there are still those who paint immigrants as threats today.

To see this, we do not have to cast our eyes even as far as the shameful depiction by U.S. President Donald Trump of the thousands of desperate migrants making their way through Central America to the southern states as “terrorists and criminals.” An example closer to home is La Meute (the “Wolfpack”), a racist Francophone anti-immigrant group, doing the same thing in Quebec regarding the irregular migrants seeking to leave an increasingly unstable U.S. and showing up at Canada’s border .

Whatever you think of people on the move – and there are valid concerns over how the government is dealing with, and should deal with, these migrants – what is quite clear is that they present a very low to non-existent national security threat. Yes, it is always possible that there are unsavoury characters in the mix who may engage in criminal activities in Canada, but shrill fear-mongering about a wave of terrorists seeking to sow mayhem in our cities is unsubstantiated.

U.S. intelligence agencies, for instance, have stated publicly that Trump’s conviction that ISIL is using the cover of refugee flows to infiltrate the U.S. is false. In other words, the president’s own intelligence services have taken the rare step to openly tell Americans that there is no “there” there, despite Trump’s demagoguery.

I am neither naïve nor ignorant of the real terrorist threat, having spent 15 years with CSIS as a strategic terrorism analyst and having written four books on the topic. It is always possible that malefactors use the immigration system to enter Canada – and we have had examples in the recent past. At the same time, however, there is simply no evidence that this represents a significant risk for our country. Our intelligence and other government organizations are on top of this, and they will advise the proper authorities when they come across solid information about a real risk so that action can be taken.

The rest of us – yes, that includes members of La Meute and other anti-immigrant and Islamophobic groups – need to start trusting in those agencies and stop irrationally hitting the panic button on immigration. Canada needs more people for its economic and social development and immigration is one way to get those people. Immigration is a strength, not a weakness.

Besides, no one should have to endure what my grandfather did. No one.

Source: Gurski: Linking immigration and terrorism is wrong, in Canada and elsewhere

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Feds tap U.K. company to ‘redirect’ Canadians away from violent extremism online

2018/11/07 Leave a comment

Interesting effort to leverage UK experience and expertise in prevention:

The federal government has tapped a U.K.-based company to attempt to “redirect” Canadians at risk of radicalization to violent extremism.

The Liberal government awarded Moonshot CVE a $1.5-million grant to develop a project called “Canada Redirect,” aimed at identifying extremist content online and pushing positive counter messaging at those seeking it out.

Micah Clark, Moonshot CVE’s Canada program director, said the idea is not to take down extremist propaganda, but to connect Canadians who are accessing it with alternative content.

Picture searching for white nationalist content on YouTube, only to be offered advertisements for counter radicalization and outreach resources in your “up next” playlist.

“Taking down accounts and trying to silence extremists online is a laudable goal, in one sense, but it doesn’t work with the logic of the internet … the fact that the internet grows in its own way,” Clark told the Star Tuesday.

“And so Redirect, the idea (is to) use the … logic of the internet, use the fact that people look for everything through a search engine, and try to use that to try and benefit people that may be at risk to radicalization to violence.”

According to Public Safety Canada, the redirect method has been deployed in a dozen countries since 2015. Moonshot CVE’s program would be a first for Canada.

The first challenge, Clark said, is identifying what extremist content Canadians are searching out.

Last month, Moonshot CVE provided the Star with a snapshot of the kind of right-wing extremist content Canadians are seeking out online — but that’s likely just the tip of the iceberg.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has identified a growing white nationalist and right-wing extremist presence online in recent years. The internet is an important tool for any extremist ideology, to disseminate propaganda, build communities, and recruit adherents.

Clark said Moonshot CVE will not be focusing on any single extremist ideology, instead trying to connect counter messaging to any vulnerable Canadians at risk of radicalization.

Source: Feds tap U.K. company to ‘redirect’ Canadians away from violent extremism online

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with , , ,

Chris Selley: Ontario’s no-health care-for-terrorists bill is nonsense at its best

2018/10/29 Leave a comment

Another good column by Selley on the Ontario Conservatives virtue signalling:

The Ontario government wants to make convicted terrorists ineligible for licences to drive, hunt and fish, for public health insurance, for housing and income assistance, for student loans, and to parent their own children. It wants to do this because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is soft on terrorism — specifically on the question of Canadians returning home after fighting for ISIL.

“I am disgusted that the federal government is not dealing with this,” Progressive Conservative MPP Dave Smith told reporters this week. “What we’re doing is we are taking away privileges from criminals.”

“If you leave Canada to go fight for ISIS, you should not be welcomed back with open arms,” Premier Doug Ford tweeted. “Since Justin Trudeau doesn’t seem to take this seriously, (Smith) is taking action to send a message that there are consequences for leaving Ontario to commit indefensible crimes.”

Sometimes governments come up with laws that they think will make their jurisdiction a better place, and they advance them in their legislature and in the media in good faith. And sometimes they come up with laws the primary purpose of which is to generate opposition to those laws, which they can then use to attack the opponents. The federal Conservatives’ Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, and the accompanying “snitch line” announced during the 2015 election campaign, was a good example of the latter. To question its necessity or wisdom or choice of wording was to be accused of sanctioning everything from child marriage to polygamy to female genital mutilation.

The Ontario Tories’ Bill 46, more soberly titled the Terrorist Activities Sanctions Act, certainly has great potential as the second kind of legislation: Have fun out there arguing on behalf of a terrorist’s right to health care or a hunting licence or to raise his kids unmolested. (Bill 46 would deem any such children in need of protection under the Child, Youth and Family Services Act.) But let’s give Smith and Ford the benefit of the doubt and assume they also think this is good public policy.

Attorney General Caroline Mulroney, or any other lawyer, could tell them that their public policy is almost certain to be torn to shreds in the courts, at great and pointless public expense. As it stands even the most vile criminals, if released, are entitled to public health insurance; denying it to one class of criminals as explicit punishment for violating a section of the Criminal Code would attract no end of legal opposition. It could be found to violate the Constitution, which unambiguously makes criminal law the federal government’s jurisdiction. It could be found to violate Section 7 of the Charter, which enshrines the “right to life, liberty and security of the person”; or Section 12, the protection against cruel and unusual punishment; or even Section 6, which guarantees the right “to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province,” and which isn’t vulnerable to the notwithstanding clause. Legal arguments aside, the federal government could simply withhold transfers until Ontario started providing health care to all its citizens again.

Howard Anglin, executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, doesn’t buy all the legal arguments being made against Bill 46. But he thinks Canadian courts might well buy many of them. “I would bet pretty heavily that the Canadian courts would find that the province is violating a right to health care for these individuals,” he says. “The health care component is probably dead in the water.” As, he argues, is the bit about taking away people’s kids. “That’s not going to fly,” he says, arguing that determination requires a “quintessentially individualized analysis.”

There are logical arguments the government might make for some of these measures. Cars and trucks being popular tools for terrorists nowadays, perhaps we’d rather ISIL veterans not be authorized to drive them. We certainly wouldn’t want to license them to own firearms, let alone hunt with them. But the government isn’t making those arguments. It’s making no bones about the fact it simply wants to punish these people for a criminal act, which is not its bailiwick — points for honesty, but it makes it all the more likely the courts will torpedo it.

It’s entirely understandable that people are appalled by the idea of Canadians returning home after committing atrocities in Syria and not face consequences. Anything Canada can do to bring these people to justice, while respecting constitutional rights and the rule of law, it should do. But that only highlights the central absurdity of Bill 46: It doesn’t even apply unless someone is already convicted of a terrorism offence under the Criminal Code, which is precisely what Ford’s government complains isn’t happening.

The convicted would (or certainly should) face many stringent post-release conditions that actually make sense. Neither denying them “free” treatment for a communicable disease nor prohibiting them from fishing makes any sense on any level except as arbitrary, bloody-minded and very likely counterproductive retribution that it’s not in the province’s power to mete out in the first place. This bill is a turkey, and someone with a hunting license ought to kill it.

Source: Chris Selley: Ontario’s no-health care-for-terrorists bill is nonsense at its best

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with ,

Le Centre de prévention de la radicalisation en péril

2018/10/16 Leave a comment

Was fortunate enough to attend a briefing on their activities, where their approach was interesting.

But the one thing that struck me was just how glossy was their information package, violating one of my first rules of government publications: use obviously recycled non-glossy paper:

Le Centre de prévention de la radicalisation menant à la violence (CPRMV) traverse des difficultés financières importantes au point de mettre sa survie en jeu, a admis le président de son conseil d’administration à La Presse.

«Il est minuit moins cinq», a affirmé Richard Filion au cours d’une brève conversation téléphonique. L’homme dit travailler «pour assurer la pérennité des opérations du centre».

Le versement des salaires des employés a été suspendu pendant quelques semaines, plus tôt cette année, et cette situation risque de se reproduire à court terme, selon nos informations.

En cause : le non-renouvellement d’une entente de financement avec le ministère de la Sécurité publique et la rétention de certains versements par la Ville de Montréal, qui presse l’organisme de «réviser son modèle d’affaires à la lumière de sa capacité financière». Le Ministère et la Ville étaient les deux bailleurs de fonds du CPRMV depuis sa création.

«Je confirme que [les problèmes financiers] sont une préoccupation sur laquelle travaille le C.A. pour trouver des solutions définitives», affirme M. Filion.

Dans les couloirs du centre, selon trois sources, on attribue ces problèmes à des tensions avec les milieux policiers, ainsi qu’à l’embauche controversée de Sabrine Djermane et El Mehdi Jamali juste après leur acquittement d’accusations de terrorisme, l’hiver dernier.

Défaut de paiement

Du côté du ministère de la Sécurité publique (MSP), on indique que «des démarches ont été entreprises en vue d’élaborer une nouvelle entente visant à octroyer à l’organisme un soutien financier». La dernière est arrivée à échéance en mars, mais le dernier paiement a seulement été effectué il y a trois semaines, à la fin de septembre, a ajouté Patrick Harvey, responsable des communications du MSP.

À la Ville de Montréal, on se fait plus clair : la municipalité est devenue le seul bailleur de fonds du CPRMV depuis la fin de son entente avec le MSP et elle «ne peut soutenir des interventions à l’extérieur de son territoire». Celles-ci représentaient 50% du travail du centre jusqu’à maintenant.

En outre, la Ville de Montréal a expliqué qu’elle retenait actuellement un versement de 400 000 $ destiné au centre parce que celui-ci est en défaut de paiement. Il «doit à la Ville des loyers et le remboursement d’un salaire à hauteur de 58 000 $», a indiqué Linda Boutin, chargée des communications.

«La Ville de Montréal, à titre de bailleur de fonds unique, veut s’assurer que le financement municipal soit utilisé pour accomplir des actions auprès de la clientèle montréalaise en fonction des champs de compétence municipale.»

Lancé en grande pompe par Denis Coderre et le ministre Pierre Moreau en 2015, le centre constituait alors «une première en Amérique du Nord», de l’avis du maire de Montréal. «Le vivre-ensemble requiert un équilibre entre l’ouverture et la vigilance», avait-il affirmé, reprenant le mantra de son administration et de ses ambitions sur la scène internationale.

Un projet d’expansion du centre à Québec, exprimé l’année dernière, avait été accueilli très négativement par le maire Régis Labeaume. «On n’a pas besoin de ça à Québec», avait-il réagi, excluant toute possibilité de financer un tel projet.

349 demandes d’assistance

Contrairement à d’autres services du genre dans le monde, le Centre travaille de façon indépendante de la police et refuse de partager les informations obtenues des individus radicalisés ou de leurs proches, sauf autorisation ou danger imminent.

L’organisation compte 18 employés. Selon son dernier rapport annuel, il a reçu 349 demandes d’assistance en 2017.

Le recrutement par le centre du couple Djermane-Jamali comme «consultants en prévention» avait causé la controverse, l’hiver dernier. Ils auraient été chargés de contribuer à la rédaction d’un guide sur la prise en charge des accusés de terrorisme et auraient apporté leur vision du «processus d’endoctrinement des jeunes au Québec». Ils ont toutefois démissionné rapidement après que leur embauche a été dévoilée par La Presse.

Source: Le Centre de prévention de la radicalisation en péril

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Would-be Canadian terrorists are often made in Canada: Gurski

2018/09/05 Leave a comment

Good reminder by Phil Gurski:
What is a citizen? Well, it depends. The concept appears to date back to city states in ancient Greece, but in the modern era each state decides what the rules are. For the average person citizenship is determined by the particular country in which they were born. There are, however, exceptions. Some nations recognize anyone born on their soil—so-called jus soli—so that if a woman gives birth while in transit on a flight that child can receive that country’s citizenship. Others do not.
During the recent Conservative convention in Halifax a resolution was passed calling for the government to stop granting citizenship to anyone born on Canadian soil, and instead to require at least one parent to be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident. The motion was spurred by a belief that pregnant non-Canadian women were flying to Canada for the sole purpose of giving birth, although there are no indications that this is a significant problem in our country. The Conservative position has already led to reactions that it is not necessary.
Two cases in our country have arisen that lead to interesting dilemmas. In the first, two children born in Canada to Russians here illegally as spies were once seen as citizens. The Supreme Court is currently weighing in on a lower court decision that removed their citizenship. I imagine that most Canadians would not want to see the offspring of Russian spies receive the privileges our country has to offer, even if the fact they were born here was not their ‘fault’.
So what about terrorists? The Harper government tried to enact legislation that would strip those convicted of terrorist offences in Canada of their citizenship. The case of Zakaria Amara, one of the leaders of the 2005-6 Toronto 18 terrorist cell, was the test case. His citizenship was revoked but re-granted after the Liberals took power.
Like the case of the children of the Russian “illegals” I would wager that most Canadians would have little to no problem with taking away the benefit of being one of us from someone who sought to blow us up. If an immigrant to whom we granted citizenship goes and becomes a terrorist and plans to kill his fellow Canadians, does he deserve to be one of us? Great question.
There are of course limitations on when a state can take citizenship away. No state can—or rather, no state should—render a person stateless. Hence, an individual with status in only one country can not have that status taken away: that act can only be applied to those who can fall back on a secondary citizenship. Mr. Amara had dual Jordanian-Canadian citizenship and had temporarily lost the latter.
As I argued in Western Foreign Fighters, however, the decision to take away citizenship does not solve one significant issue: those who come to our land as children and become terrorists (note that I wrote “become” and not “were born as”) do so within our society. In other words, the process of radicalization occurs here, not elsewhere. Even if we were to remove such people who pose a threat to us through their terrorist plots by stripping them of their Canadian citizenship and deporting them, this does little to disrupt the incidence of radicalization here (aside of course from removing one radicalizing influence who can affect others).
This is an important detail. Contrary to public wisdom, radicalization to violence is a Canadian problem: it does not appear on our shores via the immigration system. We thus have to learn to deal with it and the government has started a new centre to help coordinate those efforts.
I fully understand the anger that Canadians feel towards those of us who choose to embrace terrorism (note that I wrote “choose” and not “were duped into”): I share that anger. Perhaps steps to yank citizenship will act as a deterrent for others: perhaps not (I lean towards the latter). Which ever way the government goes it does not eliminate the need to develop a better understanding of why Canadians radicalize to violence, and either travel abroad to join terrorist groups or plan acts here. One thing we cannot do is deport our way out of this problem.

Filed under Citizenship, Radicalization Tagged with

No, CSIS does not ‘target’ Muslims with no accountability (Gurski) and the piece that prompted it (Gardee)

2018/07/17 Leave a comment

Phil Gurski on Ihsaan Gardee’s earlier column (reprinted below):

There are times when you read something that makes your blood boil and demands a response. One such time occurred to me last week within the pages of The Hill Times in an op-ed by Ihsaan Gardee, executive director of the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM). Entitled “Government must rebuild trust with Canadian Muslims on national security“, this op-ed piece is full of language like “over-reaching and draconian,” “smearing Muslims,” “Islamophobia,” “systemic bias and discrimination,” and “little or no accountability,” all directed at CSIS and other agencies involved in national security.

Gardee paints a picture of CSIS that seems to have it in for Canada’s Muslims and which has undermined attempts by those communities to “establish robust partnerships.” He appears convinced that CSIS is an organization run rogue that has “protracted problems” which leads to the “stigmatization” of those among us who are Muslim.

As a former analyst at CSIS who not only worked on Islamist extremism for 15 years, but who has written four books on the topic—and met with Muslims all across the country to discuss the issues of radicalization and terrorism—I think I am in a better position than him to draw a better picture. And no, for the record, I am not a ‘shill’ for CSIS and more than happy to point to the bad as well as the good within the agency.

So to the first accusation levelled by Gardee: does Islamophobia exist within CSIS? Absolutely—I saw it first-hand and challenged it when I saw it, although it is not as pervasive as he thinks it is. And, yes, the lawsuit containing allegations about Islamophobia among other shortcomings that was settled by five former employees was based on facts, as I outlined quite clearly in a previous Hill Times column. Aside from that, however, everything else Gardee alleges as endemic within CSIS—I cannot speak for another agency such as CBSA as I never worked there and would never purport to know what goes on within its walls—is false. As CSIS won’t publicly address these fabrications, I will, if for no other reason than I toiled tirelessly for a decade and a half to do my small part in keeping Canadians safe from terrorism and don’t want my time construed as wasted in a racist environment.

But if you look at the terrorist/violent extremist environment in Canada since 9/11, which seems to be the timeframe Gardee sees when everything went to hell for Muslim Canadians, the vast majority of attacks have been perpetrated by Islamist extremists. And that does not even take into account the Islamic State ‘foreign fighter’ phenomenon that led to the deaths of countless thousands in Iraq and Syria. Does this perhaps explain why CSIS and its partners have focused on the Muslim community in that time, given that these perpetrators come from that community?

What Gardee appears to fail to understand is that CSIS is an intelligence agency that is driven by intelligence. Intelligence tells it where to put its resources; that and government requirements. If the threat is emanating primarily from a small number of Canadians who happen to be Muslim then that is exactly where you would want our protectors to look, not elsewhere.

I am not saying that CSIS or its employees are perfect. No, they are not as they are human. In addition, there is always room for improvement, and that includes its relations with communities across Canada, Muslims among them. Since 9/11, however, CSIS has done its part with its partners to prevent deaths. I would think that Gardee would at least acknowledge that much.

I thus reject Gardee’s accusations. He owes CSIS an apology for his ill-considered words. Phil Gurski is a former strategic analyst with CSIS, an author and the Director of Intelligence and Security at the SecDev Group.

via No, CSIS does not ‘target’ Muslims with no accountability – The Hill Times

Gardee’s op-ed made in the context of C-59:

Once bitten, twice shy. That’s the sense within Canadian Muslim communities when it comes to the Liberal government’s proposed overhaul of national security law under Bill C-59.

The legislation was back before the House last week after examination by the Public Safety and National Security Committee.

Let’s not forget where this first started. Under the previous government, Canadian anti-terrorism laws quickly morphed into overreaching and draconian policies. This was coupled with Muslim communities facing jarring public scrutiny and increasing Islamophobia.

Back then, despite efforts from Canadian Muslims to establish robust partnerships on national security, the government’s response was to smear them as a threat to Canada. The result: trust between Canadian Muslims and the government agencies tasked with protecting us all evaporated after years of work.

The days when the loyalty of Canadian Muslims was being questioned by government officials seem behind us—for now. But that is no standard by which to measure meaningful change.

That very public show of Islamophobic discourse by government overshadowed something even more alarming—the permeating of systemic bias and discrimination against Muslims by and in our security agencies.

In the past several months alone, we have seen sweeping allegations by CSIS employees about racism and Islamophobia within the service and new data that suggests the CBSA disproportionately targets non-whites, particularly those from the Middle East.

These accounts, along with the direct reports regularly received by our organization, only amplify concerns about what Canadian Muslims have been experiencing for years.

To be fair, Bill C-59 does make important, long-overdue improvements to previous laws, including better and more focused review powers and mechanisms as well as some stricter directives to prevent complicity with torture by foreign powers.

Last December, our organization told the House Public Safety Committeethat redress and review were only a partial solution to the problems plaguing Canada’s national security system. Real reform of security work is necessary to address systemic bias and discrimination.

As outlined by experts and civil society, there are several concerning elements in Bill C-59; however, two key issues have recently come to the fore.

First, the government has not substantially reined back the contentious disruption powers given to CSIS—an agency that we know through public inquiries has targeted Muslims with little to no accountability for their actions. There must be a concerted effort by government to confront the systemic bias in the way CSIS approaches and resources its intelligence work. Until real change occurs, these powers which remain unproven in their effectiveness are only an invitation to more abuse and scandal.

Second, the lack of due process in the Passenger Protect Program—Canada’s No Fly List—continues. This has been one of the most troubling instruments of state power for over a decade. There are no reported cases of Canadians successfully getting off the list through the Passenger Protect Inquiries Office which was created in 2016. Families impacted by the list say the inquiries office has been of little to no use. Although recently funding has been earmarked for a new redress system to remove false flagging, how and why Canadians find themselves on this draconian list in the first place remains unanswered.

As we look ahead, the aegis of this legislation does not engender the kind of trust from communities that is needed.

Incidentally, Public Safety Canada’s recently launched Canada Centre for Community Engagement and the Prevention of Violence is pledging a strategy that “reflects the realities faced by Canada’s diverse communities.” Canadian Muslims are closely watching whether this initiative is yet another exercise in falsely framing national security as the “Muslim problem” or whether policymaking will finally take into account the growing threat of far-right extremism in Canada.

In other words, rebuilding trust with our communities cannot be achieved through roundtables and focus groups.

It has been more than a decade since the Arar Inquiry report first outlined some of the protracted problems within our country’s security apparatus. Through the haze of political haste, 12 years later Canadian Muslims are still seeking the partnership with government that ends their national security stigmatization.

Government must rebuild trust with Canadian Muslims on national security

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , ,

Many jihadis from Germany have German citizenship: Report | DW

2018/05/23 Leave a comment

More on German debates and the question of citizenship revocation. As noted, more symbolic than more effective approaches:

The German government knows of more than 1,000 Islamists who have left Germany for Syria or Iraq to support terrorist organizations there, media reported on Sunday.

The figure comes from an answer given by the government to a question from the parliamentary representatives of the Left Party, according to newspapers of the Funke media group.

The government also cited security authorities as saying that more than half of those who had left Germany for such conflict zones had German passports, the newspapers said in their report.

The figure given by the government shows a further increase in the number of those traveling abroad as jihadis, but indicates that the rate of departures has slowed considerably in comparison with two years ago.

According to the report, 243 supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) have also travelled abroad to support the coalition fighting the extremist group “Islamic State” (IS). Germany classes the PKK as a terrorist organization.

Unconstitutional proposal?

Although dozens of German Islamists are in prison in Syria, Iraq and Turkey, many others, including women and children, have since returned to Germany.

The report said that during coalition negotiations between Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), it was agreed that returning fighters with double citizenship should have their German nationality canceled if there is evidence of their having fought for a terrorist militia.

This plan was criticized by the Left Party’s expert for domestic affairs, Ulla Jelpke, who called it “unconstitutional.” She also told the Funke group newspapers that such a move would punish Germans who had fought alongside the Kurds against IS.

Turning back jihadis

Her counterpart from the SPD, Uli Grötsch, also slammed the proposal, even though his party agreed to it in the coalition deal.

“It is more symbolic than politically useful,” he said, saying that prosecution and deradicalization were what was needed instead.

However, the domestic affairs expert of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), Armin Schuster, defended the measure, saying that a jihadi who was no longer German could be sent back at the border.

via Many jihadis from Germany have German citizenship: Report | News | DW | 20.05.2018

Filed under Citizenship, Radicalization, Revocation Tagged with ,

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