Taliban Official’s Visit to German Mosque

Bisma Hameed

The presence of a high-ranking Afghan Taliban leader in a mosque in the German city of Cologne has infuriated both the government and local authorities. “We strongly condemn the appearance of Taliban representative Abdul Bari Omar in Cologne,” the Foreign Office said on X. A seminar hosted by an Afghan association in the city brought Abdul Bari Omar, an official with the Taliban-run health authority in Afghanistan, to the mosque. The condemnation of Germany is rooted in its history of facing terror attacks from terrorist organizations. Germany faced terrorism just because it gave shelter to the foreigners for whom the external forces were fighting. 

Since the 1960s, terrorist groups seeking to pursue various goals have played a vital role in international relations. After the Cold War ended, this component of the international power system became stronger, mainly because of Islamist fanatics. Political terrorism is not a new occurrence in Germany. Germany has already had to deal with various leftist and rightist operations on its soil. It was also a target of outside attacks in the second half of the twentieth century by the Palestinian movement and radical Kurdish organizations, particularly the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), who attempted to transfer tensions in Turkey to Germany.

The reason for this is that Germany is a Western country that has joined the international “war on terrorism.” Many terrorist acts were executed on German territory, which also acted as a logistics base. After the “war on terrorism” was launched and German troops were sent to Afghanistan, the situation altered. Despite its active involvement in the battle, Germany remained a secondary target of terrorist attacks. The Munich massacre, which occurred on September 5, 1972, during the Summer Olympic Games, was the first foreign terrorist attack on Germany. The Palestinian Black September Organisation carried it out. The organization’s purpose, stemming from the ruthlessly suppressed Palestinian uprising against Jordan’s King Hussein in 1970, was to destroy Israel and establish a Palestinian state.

Germany was not the intended objective. The incident took place in Munich only because the Olympic Games were being hosted there and the event provided the ideal environment for a terrorist strike. Another Palestinian operation against the Federal Republic of Germany took place in the same month. A Lufthansa airplane was hijacked. The hijackers demanded that the terrorists who survived the Munich attack be released. The demand was met almost immediately.

Kurdish terrorism emerged in Germany following reunification in the 1990s. Gastarbeiters were sent to Germany from Turkey, where the Kurdish minority was repressed. Germany was a prosperous haven and a haven for the new immigrants. The problems began when the extreme nationalist and leftist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began to “import” the Kurdish-Turkish conflict to Germany.

Germany was chosen as a battleground for a variety of reasons. One of them was the large number of Kurds in the Federal Republic of Germany. According to the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, between 450,000 and 500,000 Kurds lived in Germany in the mid-1990s. Another reason was that the PKK was banned by German authorities in November 1993. For many Kurds, even those who did not agree with its methods, the PKK served as a stand-in for an independent Kurdish state. As a result of the prohibition, Kurds became more radical and equated Germany with hostile Turkish.

The first Kurdish terrorist strikes occurred on July 24, 1993. PKK fighters occupied the Turkish embassy in Munich and kidnapped 23 people. Simultaneously, smaller operations were conducted around Germany (and Europe) against Turkish diplomatic outposts, airlines, travel firms, and banks.  The victims were mostly foreigners staying in the FRG and not Germans. The devastation that occurred on 11/9 stunned the whole globe. Germans, on the other hand, were still unable to acknowledge that global terrorism posed a threat to them. Despite newly revealed information that a significant portion of the terrorist attacks on September 11th were planned in Hamburg by Al-Qaeda members who were university students there, and some of the hijackers were seemingly assimilated, unsuspected students who had lived in Germany for years, that attitude remained unchanged.

Germans thought that, while their country may serve as a base for terrorists, it would never be the target of another attack. Germany used a pacifist policy to combat unjustified terrorist attacks, and it has shown to be effective for the safety of its inhabitants. Its renewed and peaceful soil cannot and should not show or tolerate any act that demonstrates a soft spot for the Taliban, who once made the state and its citizens insecure, and its security capabilities being called into question when the international media had the opportunity to cover the ‘dilettantism’ of police officers. Germany’s separation from the UN in the case of Iraq demonstrates that it does not want to be involved in any situation that may welcome terrorism toward the state.

The writer tweets @BismaHameed15.