[LINK] "Germany Clamps Down on Flow of Fighters to Islamic State"

[rfmcdonald]

Rainer Buergin and Arne Delfs' Bloomberg article looks at Germany's ongoing attempt to limit the flow of volunteers fighting for the Islamic State.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is planning legal changes that will allow it to keep Germans from leaving to join groups such as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said.

Under the planned law, the government can retract identity cards of potential foreign fighters and replace them with substitute identification, de Maiziere told reporters in Berlin today. Without passports, which can already be confiscated, or ID cards, suspects wouldn’t be able to leave Germany, he said after a meeting with state interior ministers.

“We don’t want terrorism to be exported from Germany, we don’t want men and sometimes women who grew up in Germany and have undergone radicalization to carry terrorism to Syria and Iraq,” de Maiziere said. “And we certainly don’t want some of them to return battle-hardened to plan attacks.”

More than 450 Islamists with German citizenship have left the country to join fighters in Syria and Iraq, and more than 150 have returned, often to recruit more fighters to join their cause, the Interior Ministry said separately in an e-mailed statement.

Germany will take a dual approach that aims to crack down on the cross-border movement of suspects while at the same time using preventive measures to counter the radicalization of “young people” who’ve been exposed to terrorism propaganda and Salafism, an ultraconservative Sunni interpretation of Islam, the ministry said.