German police raided a mosque and eight apartments on Wednesday, in Hildesheim, South of Hanover.
“We will not put up with Salafist associations and their backers flouting our rules and bringing our rule of law into question and convincing young people that they want to join the so-called IS,” Lower Saxony’s Interior Minister Boris Pistorius said.
Hildesheim is the epicenter of a home-grown movement of German-speaking Islamists. German authorities are attempting to crackdown on radical Salafist ideology following a string of attacks motivated in two cases by Islamist militancy. There is a pool of 8.900 Salafists in recent years, up from 7,000 in 2014 Reuters reports.
Members of the mosque in Lower Saxony have fought in Syria and Iraq as volunteers and there is hate-preaching and incitement to jihad, according to the Interior Ministry of Lower Saxony.
Taking on Salafism has become a rising priority as the nature of terrorism is moving from hierarchical organizations to “brand name” terrorism in which a small number of individuals pledge allegiance and act on their own initiative. In this scheme, terrorist organizations like IS claim the terrorist rather than responsibility for the terrorist act. [NEW EUROPE] Read more
