German spy agency says IS remains potent

Islamic State militants will be able to mount operations in Iraq "for the foreseeable future" despite US-led airstrikes and efforts by Iraqi security forces to regain territory, Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency said.

German intelligence also sounded the alarm about a rising number of Islamist militants inside Germany ready to join the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria and warned of an increased risk of violent clashes on German streets between rival radical groups.

The Islamic State group has seized swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria this year, declared an Islamic "caliphate" and has executed or driven away Shite Muslims, Christians and other groups that do not share their radical version of Sunni Islam.

In a statement on Tuesday, BND said the Islamic State group was still able to operate successfully in the western Iraqi province of Anbar and outside Baghdad and was working to convince more Iraqi Sunnis to turn against the US-led coalition.

"The continuation of the political and security vacuum in Iraq for the foreseeable future will make fighting terrorist, radical groups considerably harder," it said.

In Syria, the BND said fighting between Islamic State and Kurdish forces in Kobane, near the Turkish border, showed that the militants were still in a position to attack, even if their mobility was impaired by US-led airstrikes.

Because of limited resources, the forces of President Bashar al-Assad are concentrated in urban centers of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo along Syria's north-to-south axis and the coast, where they have seen some military successes, the BND said.

Assad's forces have largely turned their backs on Syria's sparsely populated east, allowing Islamic State to expand there, it added.

In a parallel statement, BND's sister agency BfV, which handles domestic intelligence, said the number of Salafist Islamists was rising in Germany, and with it the number of potential Islamic State recruits. About 450 people have traveled from Germany to join the radicals.

Salafists espouse a strict, puritanical form of Islam.

The BfV said some Chechens living in Germany were joining Salafist groups and added that many of those recruits were especially active and violent. It also warned of increased clashes in Germany between Islamist groups and supporters of Kurdish separatists, echoing the Kobane conflict.

"Salafists are recruiting fighters for IS. Since the summer of 2014 the Kurdistan Workers' Party is recruiting its followers to fight against IS," said BfV President Hans-Georg Maassen.

The Kurdistan Workers' Party has been fighting Turkish security forces for decades in a campaign to carve out a Kurdish homeland in southeast Turkey.

(China Daily 10/29/2014 page12)