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FRANKFURT-As Germans struggle to make sense this week of reports of a foiled terrorist plot, they are questioning whether their Turkish minority-historically moderate and for the most part comfortably settled-is quite what they thought.One of the three men arrested in the plot was a Turk, and on Friday the authorities said three of the suspects still being sought, and possibly more, were also of Turkish origin.While this is not the first time Turks have come under suspicion-last summer,the police briefly detained a number of German Turks for reportedly planning to bomb a pop concert-this case involves a network of an entirely different order that is said to stretch to Istanbul and Pakistan.It bears a disquieting similarity to one of Europe’s gravest homegrown terrorist attacks, the suicide bombings in London in July 2005 by four Britons of Pakistani and West Indian backgrounds"“German officials don’t like to talk about this, because it is politically sensitive, but they are genuinely afraid,” said Guido Steinberg, who advised the previous German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, on terrorism.“We profited from the fact that most of the terrorists are Moroccans, Algerians or Kurds,” said Mr. Steinberg, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. “But we’ve got about two million Turks who are a theoretical recruiting base, and that’s a critical mass.” There are, in fact, 2.7 million people of Turkish descent in Germany, 900,000 of whom are citizens, and extremism is starting to take root among them-not just in Turkish enclaves but in ordinary towns like Langen, outside Frankfurt, where Adem Yilmaz, a 28-year-old Turk who was arrested, spent his teenage years.The Yilmaz family lives in one of a stout troop of stucco apartment houses near the city library. On the gray, unadorned block sit a mix of German and Turkish names on yellowed mailbox labels. A woman who answered the door was not wearing a Muslim head scarf; she declined a request for an interview.“At first he looked like a normal boy,” Erich Rang, who lives in the apartment below the family, said of Mr. Yilmaz.“Then all of a sudden you could see him with a big beard, like the Taliban.“There was a time when you didn’t see him, and people said he was doing his military service in Turkey.”German intelligence sources say Mr. Yilmaz was at a training camp in Pakistan in March 2006, run by the Islamic Jihad Union, a splinter group of a terrorist organization from Uzbekistan.A 2006 report by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the domestic intelligence agency, classified 32,150 Muslims living here as having extremist tendencies.Of the total, 27,250 were of Turkish origin. But only a tiny fraction of those Turks-fewer than 100-are viewed as truly dangerous and kept under regular surveillance.Turkish leaders expressed shock and dismay at the apparent involvement of Turks in this case.They condemned the plotters and heaped praise on the German authorities for their police work.But some said they now feared a backlash.“Now, when Germans see a young Turkish man going to evening prayer, will they say, ‘Aha, this is a sign of the radical drift of the Turkish community in Germany’?” asked Sedef Ozakin, a German Turk and member of the Munich city council.She acknowledged that there were signs of radicalism among a small number of mostly young Turks. It manifests itself in two ways, she said: in religious fervor, but also in a less well noted sense of Turkish nationalism, evident on T-shirts and hats emblazoned with the Turkish flag, which are popular among teenagers.The solution to this, Ms. Ozakin said, is for mainstream Turkish organizations in Germany to reach out to the young to prevent them from being led astray by radical or violent ideologies.The trouble is, established Turkish groups, founded in the early years of immigration, are not attractive to third- and fourth-generation immigrants.Many of these people were born in Germany or, like Mr. Yilmaz, spent much of their lives here. They have little interest in the cloistered world of tea-drinking, suit-wearing men that one finds in the courtyards at mainstream Turkish mosques.Instead, they are attracted to smaller independent mosques, which are often more radical, according to Dirk Halm, a researcher at the Center for Studies on Turkey at the University of Duisburg-Essen.Precise numbers are hard to find, but experts say the number of these mosques is rising. More than half the mosques in Berlin do not belong to traditional Turkish mosque organizations, Mr. Halm said.To read more go to:
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