Paris
Attacks: How Great Are the Terror Dangers Posed by Refugees?
By
Jörg Diehl and Anna Reimann
November
16, 2015 – 03:44 PM
It
has now been confirmed that one of the Paris suicide bombers reached
Europe disguised as a refugee. Security officials had long felt that
such a scenario was unlikely. How big is the risk?
It hasn't taken long
for the French authorities to begin learning details as to who was
behind Friday night's terrorist attacks in Paris. Several of
perpetrators, officials learned over the weekend, are from France,
with two having most recently lived in Brussels and two more residing
just outside of the French capital. Investigators believe that a
27-year-old Belgian man named Abdelhamid A. was the coordinator of
the attacks, which cost the lives of at least 132 people at multiple
sites in Paris on Friday evening.
One piece of news
regarding the attackers, however, has received a particularly large
amount of attention. Not far from the corpse of one of the suicide
bombers, a Syrian passport was found. On Monday, French authorities
confirmed that the attacker traveled with the passport into the
European Union via Greece as a refugee.
The discovery would
seem to confirm the fears of many in Germany and Europe that
terrorists are among the hundreds of thousands of refugees currently
streaming into Europe.
According to a
report on Greek radio, a second attacker may also be suspected of
having traveled to northern Europe via Turkey and Greece. Thus far,
however, there hasn't been an official statement given regarding the
second case.
At the moment, only
the following is known: The finger prints of the attacker who blew
himself up in front of the Stade de France stadium on Friday evening
match those taken of the man as he traveled into Greece carrying a
Syrian passport. The man, identified on the passport as Ahmad
Almohammad, arrived in Greece at the beginning of October via the
island of Leros, authorities say. Police officials say that the young
man was registered there along with a group of 69 refugees. As part
of the registration procedure, his fingerprints were taken, officials
said.
On Oct. 7, the
25-year-old, who called himself Ahmad Almohammad, entered Serbia from
Macedonia and continued on to Croatia and Austria. The Serbian
Interior Ministry issued a statement saying that he was not armed
when he traveled through Serbia. According to French justice
officials, however, the passport that he was carrying was falsified
and had been prepared in Turkey.
The confirmation
that an attacker traveled into the EU as a refugee confirms a
scenario that security officials had long thought possible, but
unlikely. After all, Islamic State hardly needs to send assailants
into Europe as refugees in order to carry out terrorist attacks on
the Continent. Hundreds of Islamists from Germany, along with
thousands from other European countries are currently in IS-held
regions of Syria and Iraq of their own free will. Because they
possess citizenships of European countries, they can return whenever
they like. French officials said on Monday that at least three of the
suspected attackers had spent time in Syria since the end of 2013 and
subsequently returned to France.
In addition, there
are large numbers of extremists who grew up in Europe and are
prepared to take part in violent attacks here. The attacks in Paris
at the beginning of this year on the editorial offices of the
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and on the Jewish supermarket Hyper
Casher demonstrate as much. So too does the subsequent attack in
Copenhagen, which saw a jihadist who had grown up in Denmark shoot
two people to death.
Intended to Mislead?
But there remain a
number of open questions. The true identity of the man who traveled
into Greece as a refugee with the falsified passport isn't yet known.
There are many possibilities. One is that he wasn't a Syrian at all.
He may have been an Islamist known to European security officials and
who had joined the Islamic State in Syria. For such an Islamist, it
may seem easier to enter Europe as a refugee under an assumed
identity -- because Syrians who arrive in Europe are almost
guaranteed of being granted refugee status.
But there are other
questions as well. Why, for example, was the attacker carrying a
passport at all? It looks as though Islamic State wanted the passport
to be found, which would play into the hands of Islamic State, which
has claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, in two ways. First,
it would increase fears in the West due to the large numbers of
refugees currently arriving, and it would further divide European
society. Secondly, it would discredit the refugees themselves. For
Islamic State, refugees are traitors for fleeing the country rather
than joining Islamic State for the establishment of a Caliphate.
The passport also
raises questions when it comes to the coordination of the terror
attacks as well. Most of the attackers were French, that much has
become clear. As such, it wasn't a fake refugee who brought terror to
Europe. The chief coordinator is thought to be a Belgian man. It is
unclear how an attack could have been prepared and organized with an
attacker who had only been in Europe for a few weeks. But here too,
the available information is sketchy. On Monday, the French
government said that the attacks appear to have been planned in
Syria.
German security
officials had repeatedly emphasized that they had no reliable
evidence that jihadists were entering Europe as part of the inflow of
refugees. At the same time, nobody was prepared to rule out such a
scenario either. Currently, German officials are investigating just
10 cases of refugees who are suspected of having fought for Islamic
State in Syria. The refugees are being investigated on suspicion of
belonging to a terrorist organization. But that doesn't mean that the
men came to Germany with the intention of carrying out attacks here.
There can be no
complete protection against the possibility that terrorists are among
the refugees. According to information obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE,
only a fraction of the refugees who enter Germany are processed with
the help of the so-called "Fast ID," a digital system that
compares fingerprints taken at the German border with those saved on
German government databases. Furthermore, "normal" IS
fighters cannot be discovered using this form of security check
because they have almost never been previously registered as such.
Checks run by German police focus more on European jihadists who are
known to authorities.
For information on
foreign fighters, German investigators are dependent on intelligence
information -- indications gleaned by the US from emails, phone
conversations or chats, for example, that a certain jihadi may have
left Syria. In such instances, however, police work is necessary to
find them, particularly if they are traveling on falsified documents.
Simply closing Europe's or Germany's borders, as has frequently been
demanded in recent weeks, wouldn't offer much protection.
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