Germany warns of Moscow-style terrorist attacks

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Germany could experience a terrorist attack on the scale of the attack on a Moscow concert hall in March just before the second week of the 2024 European Football Championship being hosted in Germany, German authorities warned.

“Europe, and therefore Germany too, are in the crosshairs of jihadist organisations, especially IS and IS-K,” said Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, referring to the Afghanistan-based offshoot IS-Khorasan, which claimed responsibility for the massacre in March in Moscow’s “Crocus City” town hall.

“One possible scenario is a large-scale, coordinated attack like the one we recently saw in Moscow,” said Thomas Haldenwang, head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service (BfV), adding that Isis-K was “certainly the most dangerous group.”

The warning coincides with the European Championship in Germany, which officials say could be an attractive target for jihadist terrorists.

The ISIS-K propaganda organ “Voice of Khorasan” recently published a collage showing a militant with an assault rifle in a football stadium, accompanied by the words: “Score the last goal!”

A survey by the University of Hohenheim found that 20 percent of respondents want to avoid public viewing events for the 2024 European Championship matches for fear of terrorist attacks.

Haldenwang said that Isis-K had succeeded in “sending its followers to Western Europe under the guise of the wave of refugees from Ukraine.”

He said the group had released numerous propaganda videos calling on its followers to carry out attacks on “soft targets” in Europe, reminiscent of the 2015 shootings in Paris at and around the Bataclan theater and the following year at Brussels airport and in the subway system.

“Something like this is Isis-K’s dream,” said Haldenwang.

However, he stressed that “lone actors” like the 25-year-old man from Afghanistan who killed a police officer and injured five others in a knife attack in the southwestern city of Mannheim earlier this month remained one of the greatest threats to public safety.

Haldenwang said the threat of Islamist terrorism had increased since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, with groups such as Isis-K inciting violence against Israel and Jews in the diaspora.

Faeser said the number of anti-Semitic crimes in Germany had “exploded” and that people who wore Jewish badges – such as members of the Makkabi Deutschland sports club – were often unable to appear in public “without being insulted or attacked.”

Experts say the Isis-K group, founded in Afghanistan in 2015, has grown in strength since the US withdrawal from Kabul in 2021 and has since increased its international activities, despite a bloody counterinsurgency campaign by the ruling Taliban to eradicate the group.

Isis-K has been linked to bombings in Iran in January that killed nearly 100 people, an attack on a church in Turkey the same month and a foiled plot to attack the Swedish parliament in March that authorities said may have been directed from Afghanistan.

According to the BfV’s 2023 annual report, the jihadist group is increasingly focusing on “attacks against ‘infidels’ in the West” in order to emphasize its importance within IS.

Last July, German police arrested seven people suspected of being members of Isis-K. According to the BfV report, they all originated from Central Asia and had entered Germany from Ukraine at the start of the large-scale Russian invasion of their western neighbor.

They had planned attacks, identified and scouted out potential targets and attempted to obtain weapons.

Earlier this month, police and prosecutors arrested a German-Moroccan-Polish citizen identified as Soufian T., who is suspected of transferring cryptocurrency worth $1,675 to an Isis-K account.

Der Spiegel reported that he had applied for a job as a steward at a public viewing of the 2024 European Football Championship.