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Imprisoned IS supporters in a Syrian anti-terror camp
Photo: Maya Alleruzzo/ AP/ DPA
In a secret operation planned for weeks, the Federal Foreign Office (AA) has taken ten German supporters of the terrorist group "Islamic State" (IS) from a prison camp in Syria.
According to SPIEGEL information, the US first flew the German citizens on Wednesday to a country neighboring Syria, where the US maintains a military base.
From there, the women and their 27 children are to be taken to Frankfurt on a Boeing 737-800 charter plane, where they are expected on Wednesday evening.
Security circles said the women were being held in the Roj prison camp, which was guarded by the Kurds, after IS was largely destroyed in Syria.
Arrest warrants have been issued in Germany against at least six of them for membership in a terrorist organization.
One of the women, 24-year-old Emilie R., is even considered by the German authorities to be an Islamist threat.
She is to be arrested immediately upon arrival in Frankfurt.
The AA had organized the return campaign for weeks in consultation with the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and the US military.
Several of the women had complained about a return to Germany through their German lawyers.
The flight is accompanied by around 30 BKA officers.
It is the fifth and largest return campaign by the federal government to date.
On the first flight in the summer of 2019, only orphans and sick children of IS supporters were brought from a camp in northern Syria via Iraq to Germany.
Several flights with women and children followed later.
The ten women are between 23 and 36 years old and come from Bavaria, Bremen, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt.
Three of them have another nationality in addition to German – in one case Turkish, in another Russian and in the third case Moroccan.
All ten are being investigated at least on suspicion of membership in a terrorist organization abroad – by the public prosecutor’s offices in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Koblenz and by the federal prosecutor Peter Frank.
His authority is leading the investigations in four cases and has obtained arrest warrants against the accused returnees in each case.
According to SPIEGEL information, the most serious case is the 36-year-old Islamist
Nadine K. from Idar-Oberstein
in Rhineland-Palatinate.
According to the investigation, she traveled with her husband via Turkey to Iraq at the end of 2014, where she joined IS.
According to investigators, a robbed house in Mosul was available to K. and her husband from 2015, which was used, among other things, to store assault rifles, explosives and pistols for the terrorist militia.
The house also acted as a contact point for female IS members who wanted advice on Islamist legal issues, such as marriage or divorce.
Nadine K. is said to have kept a Jesidin as a slave
According to the findings of the federal prosecutor's office, the Islamist couple had kept a Yazidi woman abducted by IS as a slave since 2016 at the latest.
She worked in the household and as a maid and had to endure sexual assaults by Nadine K's husband.
The slave was only released in March 2019, after the family moved to Syria.
In Germany, Nadine K. now has to answer for war crimes against property and crimes against humanity as well as human trafficking, among other things.
The federal prosecutor's office is also investigating
Emilie R. from Nuremberg
.
The German security authorities classify the 24-year-old as a "dangerous person": In July 2014, at the age of 17, she traveled to Syria with her husband, who was married under Islamic law, and became a member of IS.
In addition, she is said to have tried to lure other women and girls from Germany into IS territory on the Internet.
The Federal Public Prosecutor also accuses Fatiha B.
, 29, of membership in a terrorist organization.
B. went to Syria with her husband in September 2013, where she first worked for the terrorist group Jabhat al-Nusra before joining the IS in November 2014.
She received monthly payments from the terrorist militia for her services as a fighter's "housewife".
According to investigations by the federal prosecutor, 23-year-old
Gülseren T.
arrived in Syria at the end of 2014, where she married an IS fighter and also served as his "housewife".
Arrest warrants were also issued for her.
Several of the women who are now being brought back to Germany were married to well-known IS fighters - who are now said to be dead.
Lisa AZ
, 33, was married to Yamin AZ, who worked at Telekom in Bonn before he became radicalized and joined the »Islamic State«.
In 2015, he appeared in an IS execution video.
In it, Yamin AZ called on like-minded people in Germany to murder “infidels”: “Kill them where you find them.” At the end of the video, he and an Austrian IS terrorist shot two prisoners in Palmyra, Syria – an obvious war crime.
Arzu AK
s husband, the convert Silvio K., belonged to the Solingen Salafist group »Millatu Ibrahim«, which propagated violent »jihad« and was banned in 2012.
The couple fled to the IS in Syria via Egypt.
From there, Silvio K. called for attacks on the US air force base in Ramstein or a nuclear weapons depot in the Eifel.
Silvio K. later renounced the IS leadership - and was apparently executed by the terrorist militia for it.
His now 34-year-old widow Arzu A.-K.
was apprehended by Kurdish forces while fleeing to Turkey in 2017 and spent several years with her three children in the Roj prison camp.
Vivian S.
, 35, was active in the German Salafist scene many years ago.
She belonged to the "Global Islamic Media Front," which ran al-Qaeda propaganda online.
In court, however, she got off lightly in 2011, as punishment she was only sentenced to take part in anti-aggression training.
In Bremen, S. was temporarily on the board of the particularly radical »Culture & Family Association«, which ran a mosque in the problem district of Gröpelingen.
At the end of 2014, the Bremen Senator for the Interior banned the association – 16 men and women from its environment had previously traveled to Syria.
Among them were Vivian S. and her husband, who is believed to have died in the war zone.
The fate of the many children of IS supporters is tragic.
Some of the women had already taken small children with them to Syria, in the middle of the war zone or later in the prison camp, then several had other offspring.
The German authorities now want to take special care of the children because they should not be made to pay for the misconduct of their parents, according to security circles.
The future of the German men who had joined IS in recent years is still unclear.
In the meantime, the Kurds had also threatened the USA with deporting the suspected terrorists to their home countries.
To this day, around two dozen German IS fighters are still in prisons in northern Syria.