The federal government has announced that over a thousand people have joined ISIS from Germany to date, and said: “We don’t have information on many of these individuals. We only know that some 170 of them are dead.”
Opposition party Die Linke (The Left) had submitted a written inquiry for the Federal Government to respond to regarding the number of German citizens who joined ISIS and their current situations.
The Ministry of Interior Affairs responded to inquiry led by MPs Ulla Jelpke, Dr. André Hahn and Gökay Akbulut, and announced that over a thousand people have left Germany to go to Syria and Iraq to fight for ISIS in recent years.
35% of the people identified in the ministry response as “radical Islamists” are German citizens and 27% have dual citizenship status. According to the information provided by the ministry, the biggest group among the gang members with foreign origins are Turkish citizens.
Turkish citizens are also the biggest group, with 21%, who hold another, non-German citizenship. Citizens of Morocco are in second place, while other significant groups were citizens of Tunisia, Afghanistan and Syria.
The Ministry of Interior Affairs announced that they have information on only a small percentage of German citizens who left for Syria and Iraq, and that most of them remain unaccounted for. The ministry said, “We have information that some 170 among these people were killed in combat or otherwise.”
According to the Ministry of Interior Affairs, the “jihadists” who went from Germany to Iraq and Syria joined groups like Jabhat Al Nusra, Junud Al Sham, Hai´at Tahrir al-Sham and Harakat Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiy, as well as ISIS.
