The following article is from our September 2010 issue.

Hamburg shuts down 9/11 mosque The prayer house was a magnet for extremists – By Paul Hockenos

In the planning and execution of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, Germany played a small but critical role: It was in the northern port city of Hamburg that the attacks’ mastermind, the Egyptian-born university student Mohamed Atta became radicalized and committed to jihad.

Atta and a circle of fellow radical Islamists, several directly involved in the World Trade Center attack, met, studied and networked with al Qaeda operatives at the Al-Quds Mosque, a prayer house in the St. George’s district of downtown Hamburg. The fact that German authorities only managed to shut down the infamous mosque, renamed the Taiba Mosque two years ago, and ban the cultural organization behind it this summer attests to the enormous difficulties Germany has faced in confronting radical Islam in its midst.

There are an estimated five million Muslims in Germany, less than one percent of whom are considered to harbor radical views. Yet most observers felt that the mosque’s closure was long overdue and that the legal difficulties preventing its shutdown reflected Germany’s conflicted approach to counterterrorism in general.

The Taiba Mosque had become a symbol of Germany’s inability to tackle the problem. The Hamburg raid, during which police also searched four apartments belonging to mosque regulars, highlighted the stark reality that jihadists continue to be active in Germany, even at a site as high-profile as the Taiba Mosque.

“We have closed the mosque because it was a recruiting and meeting point for Islamic radicals who wanted to participate in so-called jihad or holy war,” said a spokesman for Hamburg’s state Interior Ministry. He explained that about 45 supporters of jihad live in the Hamburg area and around 200 people regularly attended prayers at the Taiba Mosque.

A 2009 German intelligence report noted that the Taiba Mosque was once again a “center of attraction for the jihad scene.” Militant members of the prayer house and its benefactor foundation, including German converts to Islam, traveled to Islamist training camps in Uzbekistan that year. The same year others headed off to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, where they were apprehended. The intelligence agency report concluded: “A very important factor for the radicalization of the group members was certainly their joint visits to the mosque.”

The mosque’s foremost holy man, Mamoun Darkazanli, moved in the same circles as the September 11 terrorists. The head of Hamburg’s anti-terror department called him “a hate preacher” and “elder statesman of jihad.” In 2004, Darkazanli, who has dual German and Syrian citizenship, was arrested in Hamburg on a Spanish warrant accusing him of financing Osama bin Laden’s network.

But Germany’s highest court blocked his extradition ruling it unlawful and he was eventually released. Two years later, German prosecutors ended their investigation of Darkazanli due to insufficient evidence. He lives in the Hamburg region.

Meanwhile, the closure of the mosque and the ban on the organization was widely praised in the German media. Some of them had been outspokenly critical of Germany’s weak counterterrorism policies, for which the open doors of the Taiba Mosque were only the most flagrant example. “What do violent Islamists have to do in this country to arouse enough suspicion to have their activities banned?” opined the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

A lot had to happen in Hamburg before the infamous mosque was finally shut down. The imam at whose feet Atta and his comrades once sat continued to deliver his hate-filled sermons here. Yet the crackdown doesn’t signal a whole new approach and strategy to combat Islamic extremism in Germany.

“What Germany lacks is a comprehensive de-radicalization strategy that doesn’t confine itself to banning individual meeting places like the Taiba Mosque,” wrote author Wolf Schmidt in the left-leaning German daily taz. “Britain is more advanced in this respect. Former radical preachers who have credibly renounced violence are talking to young people deemed susceptible to extremism. Why isn’t that happening here?”

German Islam expert Rauf Ceylan, a professor of Islamic studies in Osnabrück, welcomed the Hamburg raid, as, he says, did most Muslim organizations in Germany. “The overwhelming majority of Germany’s Muslims feel in no way associated with these kinds of extremists,” he says, pointing to an array of grassroots projects undertaken by Muslim communities in Germany against radicalism.

“They don’t want these kinds of people in their communities, recruiting their members. Their concerns are much like those of their German neighbors.” Hamburg’s highest security official, now the new mayor of the city, Christoph Ahlhaus, bent over backwards to emphasize that the closure was not aimed at Germany’s Muslims as a whole, just the extremists. He underscored that the majority of Germany’s Muslims are “peaceful and law-abiding.”

But, Ceylan notes, the elimination of such a public, central meeting place for radical elements makes them that much more difficult to observe and control. “So where are these people now?”, he asks. “Are they in other mosques or in private apartments or organizing on the Internet? The closure hasn’t necessarily made fighting extremists in Germany easier.”


Pictures above: Changing the locks on the Taiba Mosque. Below: Police officers securing the entrance to Hamburg’s Taiba Mosque. This is where some of the radicals who perpetrated the attack on the World Trade Center in New York met during the late 1990s.