German jihadis kill Syrian Christians

Expert says the number of German Islamists in Syria has increased from 60 to 150 in the last six months.

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
Assad forces 370 (photo credit: REUTERS)
Assad forces 370
(photo credit: REUTERS)
BERLIN – Radical German Islamists participated in the murders of Syrian Christians in an early August attack on the Turkish-Syrian border, according to a report in the German magazine FOCUS.
The magazine reported last week the involvement of nearly 100 “fanatical” German Muslims, including Germans who converted to Islam, in the Syrian civil war.
Two Western intelligence agencies provided the information to FOCUS about the role of German Islamists in the August massacre.
A German police official told the magazine that “the complicity of Germans in the extermination and ethnic cleansing in Syria is a sheer intolerable condition.”
Prosecutors are examining whether the German Muslims can be charged with participation in a terrorist organization.
The growing presence of German Islamists in Syria prompted the Federal Republic’s interior minister Hans-Peter Friedrich to issue a warning in April about the “calls for those Europeans who have been trained in battle [in Syria] to return home and pursue jihad.”
The Sunni Salafist movement in Germany has provided the main combatants for the conflict against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime. Dirk Baehr, a German political scientist who has written about European and German jihadi groups, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday that six months ago there were 60 German Islamists in Syria and now the number has climbed to 150. Many of the jihadis fighting in Syria are from Belgium, Baehr added.
In a video cited in the FOCUS report, which appears in German and Arabic, German jihadists praise the expulsion of Christians from the Syrian villages. The video shows between nine and 10 jihadis walking by dead people. Baehr said it is difficult to ascertain if the dead individuals are Christians.
One Islamic combatant strikes the head of a dead Syrian soldier in the video.
Former gangster rapper from Berlin, Denis Cuspert (a.k.a Deso Dogg), is believed to be fighting with the al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front. German counter-terrorism officials view Cuspert as a powerful recruitment tool. He made a video before his departure to Syria, urging Muslims to join the jihad in Syria.