Media reports say German officials have warned that Germany could see a terrorist attack on the scale of the assault on a Moscow concert hall in March as the Euro 2024 soccer championship it is hosting neared its second week.
“Europe, and with it Germany, are in the crosshairs of jihadist organizations, in particular Isis and Isis-K,” said German interior minister Nancy Faeser in reference to the Afghan-based affiliate called Isis-Khorasan, which claimed responsibility for the March massacre at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, according to Financial Times.
“A possible scenario is a large-scale, coordinated attack of the kind we recently saw in Moscow,” said Thomas Haldenwang, head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV), adding that Isis-K was “certainly the most dangerous group”. The warning coincides with Germany hosting the Euros, an event that officials said could provide an attractive target for jihadist terrorists. The Isis-K propaganda organ Voice of Khorasan recently posted a collage showing a militant with an assault rifle in a football stadium accompanied by the words: “shoot the last goal!”
A poll by Hohenheim university reportedly found that 20 percent of people intended to avoid public viewing events of Euro 2024 matches out of fear of terror attacks.
Haldenwang said Isis-K had succeeded in “sending its supporters to western Europe, under cover of the refugee exodus from Ukraine”.
He said the group had posted numerous propaganda videos calling on its supporters to carry out attacks on “soft targets” in Europe reminiscent of the rampages in Paris on and around the Bataclan theatre in 2015, and on the Brussels airport and metro system the following year.
“That’s the kind of thing Isis-K dreams of,” said Haldenwang.
But he stressed that “lone wolves”, such as the 25-year-old man from Afghanistan who killed a policeman and injured five others in a knife attack in the south-western city of Mannheim earlier this month, continued to be one of the biggest threats to public security.
Experts say Isis-K, which was established in Afghanistan in 2015, has increased in strength since the US withdrawal from Kabul in 2021 and has ramped up its international activities since then, despite a bloody counterinsurgency campaign by the ruling Taliban to stamp out the group
Isis-K was 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 in March to attack Sweden’s parliament that authorities said may have been directed from Afghanistan.
According to the BfV’s annual report for 2023, the jihadist group was increasingly setting its sights on “attacks against ‘infidels’ in the west” in order to highlight its importance within Isis.
