by Judith Bergman • January 4, 2020 at 5:00 am
"For decades, police turned a blind eye to extended criminal families, in part to avoid being accused of racial discrimination. This has made the present-day challenge all the more difficult as clan structures have solidified, parallel societies have formed, and the enemy has grown." — Deutsche Welle, February 3, 2019.
"There are now half a million people across Germany who belong to a clan.... Clans behave in their German surroundings as if they were tribes in the desert. Everything outside the clan is enemy territory and available for plunder". — Ralph Ghadban, a Lebanese-German political scientist and a leading expert on clans in Germany; The German Times, October 2019.
"It is known that the Osmanen Germania gang has received financial assistance from Turkey's ruling Justice and Development (AKP) party. The gang has essentially functioned as [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan's armed wing in Germany." — Sebastian Fiedler, head of the Association of German Criminal Investigators.
The clans see the state as, "an object of ridicule, a target for exploitation" — Falko Liecke, Neukölln's deputy district mayor and district councilor for youth and health. The German Times, October 2019.
Criminal Middle Eastern family clans are a large problem in Germany. The most well-known are mainly based in Berlin, Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony, and are named Abou-Chaker, Al-Zein, Remmo and Miri. Pictured: Mahmoud Al-Zein, head of the Kurdish-Lebanese Al-Zein clan, attends the funeral of a murdered criminal associate on September 13, 2018 in Berlin. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
In a recently aired documentary by German broadcaster ARD, about Germany's Middle Eastern criminal family gangs -- or clans, as they are called in Germany -- the head of Germany's Federal Criminal Police Agency (BKA) Holger Münch, said "In about one-third of proceedings, suspects also included immigrants — and that means that we need to keep a very close eye on this phenomenon".
Münch seems to have been referring to the fact that migrants who arrived in Germany from Syria, Iraq and other countries during the migrant crisis in 2015-16 are now starting to compete with Germany's long-established criminal family gangs whose original founders arrived in Germany from Lebanon in the late 1970s during Lebanon's civil war.
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