Enlarge image
IS supporters in a Kurdish prison camp in Syria (symbolic image)
Photo: Baderkhan Ahmad/AP
In a secret operation, according to SPIEGEL information, the federal government is once again flying a group of German supporters of the terrorist militia Islamic State (IS) and their children out of Syria.
The four women and four children had been in Kurdish prison camps for years.
According to information from security circles, your transfer to Germany will take place with a US Air Force transport plane via an air base in Kuwait.
The machine is expected in Frankfurt am Main in the evening hours.
According to SPIEGEL information, the federal prosecutor general and other public prosecutor's offices are investigating the women on suspicion of terrorism, among other things.
The state of health of the families who have been flown out is sometimes very bad, it is said.
The children in particular were severely traumatized.
Alleged terror plan for Germany
After the fall of the so-called Islamic State, which temporarily ruled large parts of Syria and Iraq, Kurdish fighters captured the women who were now returning.
They originally come from Lower Saxony, Thuringia, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia.
Among those who were flown out is the 33-year-old jihadist Marcia M. The convert from Salzgitter is not only a suspect for the German authorities, but also a potentially important witness who can report on the inner workings of the terrorist militia.
Marcia M. and her husband Oğuz G. are connected to an alleged large-scale IS terror plan.
Its department for "external operations" is said to have tried to smuggle terrorist squads into Germany in 2016 after the attacks in Paris and Brussels.
A large music festival was considered a possible target.
According to the investigators, Marcia M.'s job was to pair Islamists in Germany with possible assassins: as a cover, they were supposed to marry the IS fighters and put them up at home.
But the Office for the Protection of the Constitution found out about Ms chatting with German Islamists.
Finally, in November 2016, two men from the terrorist command failed to leave Syria and travel to Germany.
Marcia M. and her husband Oğuz G. ended up in Kurdish captivity, where German and American secret service agents were able to question them.
Abducted to IS as a teenager
Also in the machine is the 30-year-old German-Turkish Kevser T. from Rheine, Westphalia.
According to SPIEGEL information, T. left for the IS in Syria at the end of November 2013 with the Islamist Florian L.
The couple lived there with their two children in an apartment near Raqqa, the former capital of IS.
According to state security officials, T. is said to have been involved in smuggling other jihadists into IS in 2014.
In addition, she is said to have tried to persuade another woman in Germany to leave for Syria.
Kevser T's partner Florian L. died in fighting six years ago.
She ended up in the Kurdish detention center Roj in northeast Syria in early 2019.
The Düsseldorf public prosecutor's office is investigating the mother of two for membership in a foreign terrorist organization and violation of her duty of care and upbringing.
A 20-year-old man from Hamburg is also on board the plane.
He was kidnapped by his mother when he was a teenager.
In order to prevent him from growing up in a prison with Islamist fighters and becoming further radicalized, the federal government has deviated from the previous line in his case, only bringing women and children back to Germany.
However, the Federal Public Prosecutor is also conducting terror proceedings against him in Germany.
The air transport is the sixth return campaign to date.
Most recently, ten women and 27 children were flown to Frankfurt on a charter plane in March.
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.
A total of 40 German IS supporters are still in detention camps or prisons in northern Syria.
More than two thirds of them are men.