The German Federal Police Union has claimed that the Islamic State is sending fighters through migrant channels in order to discredit all migrants.
The German police union came out on Friday saying that the Islamic state has enough money that it doesn’t need to send its fighters through migrant channels. They say that the terror group is using the migrant crisis to stoke up fears of asylum seekers rather than use the convenient open borders and lax security to smuggle fighters and commit acts of terror Die Welt reports.
Rainer Wendt, head of the police union, has said that in the wake of the planned terror attack in Dusseldorf the first thing Germans should think of is to not blame migrants or have a general suspicion of them. The terror attack that was planned in Dusseldorf involved three Syrians who had fought for the Islamic State in Syria and had smuggled themselves across the now closed Balkan route into Germany.
Their mission was highly organized and they were in direct contact with ISIS leaders. The group planned to detonate two members as suicide bombers and a third was to shoot as many more victims as possible, hoping to kill at least 200 people in the old town of Dusseldorf.
Wendt said that the Islamic State were using the migrant crisis as a strategy, not to smuggle in fighters, but rather to give other migrants a bad name and stoke fears among Europeans. “The Islamic State has a lot of money and could use other ways,” of getting their fighters into Europe Wendt claimed.
According to the police union head the terror group would use the migrant crisis both to discredit the migrants coming into Europe but also to attempt to radicalize them and recruit them into ISIS’ ranks. He said it would be a terrible thing to insinuate that every asylum seeker entering Germany could be a potential terrorist.
He worried that this line of thinking would only play into the hands of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party who oppose mass migration and the current government’s handling of the migrant crisis.
The capture of the three terrorists in Germany this week is by no means the first time Islamic State operatives have been caught posing as asylum seekers. At least one of the attackers who committed the massacre in Paris last year was confirmed to be an asylum seeker smuggled in by the terror group.
Last month a group of Afghan nationals who came to Europe as asylum seekers were caught in Italy planning more attacks. The U.S. state department feels the threat from ISIS in Europe may be so large they have issued a travel warning ahead of this summer’s tourist season.
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