German intelligence: Rising the Number of Salafists in Berlin

By: Ahmed Jalal

The Federal Intelligence Service (State Offices for the Protection of the Constitution) has announced that the number of Salafists in Berlin is growing steadily and its members, who tend to increase violence rise too.

The German intelligence added that half of the Salafists in Berlin is German, and most of them are men. The agency pointed out that the number of members of this trend has now reached 950 persons, equivalent to more than twice as it was in 2011, which were only 350 persons.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, the number of people inclined to violence rose strongly among supporters of the Salafi trend, noting that their number was up to about 100 persons in 2011, adding that the number has risen to 420 persons.

The newspaper added that the agency prepared a study entitled “Backgrounds about the Salafi trend members” analyzed the data of a 784 Salafists. Men were the majority of the Salafists in Berlin by 90%. Their average age was 33.9 years, one year over the average age of women.

The study found that half of those belonging to the Salafi ideology in Berlin are Germans, but two-thirds of them have another nationality, most of them, Arab and Turkish. 35 percent of them have the German citizenship only. While 80 people hold Turkish citizenship.

“The Russians are the largest group of foreign Salafists,” the agency said. “The majority of these Russians are from the North Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Ossetia. Their number 92 people while the Syrian nationality was 46, and Lebanese 39.

The agency noted that the number of refugees among the Salafist in Berlin, a small, noting that they are 27 people, who arrived in Germany in 2014 and descended mainly from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Russia.

Last year, internal intelligence announced that the Salafist scene in Germany had undergone a radical change and many Salafist groups were being formed and communicated via the Internet, while they in the past, follow Salafist sheikhs such as Pierre Vogel, Sven Lao, or Ibrahim Abu Naji. The change nowadays due to the emergence of individual people collecting  “their followers” gather, therefore it is no longer possible to speak of a Salafi scene but of many hot spots.”