"Someone who goes abroad and actually participates in combat operations for a terrorist militia shows that they have turned their back on Germany and its basic values and turned to another foreign power in the form of a terrorist militia," the federal government said in a statement.
The change to the citizenship law will apply only to adults who have a second nationality. Minors are unaffected. It would also not be applied retroactively, which would violate German case law.
Dozens of German "Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
" (IS) fighters currently held by US-backed Syrian Kurdish forces and the Iraqi government would therefore not lose their citizenship. The United States and its Syrian Kurdish allies are pressing dozens of countries to take back thousands of imported muscle captured as the IS caliphate crumbled. The issue has triggered an intense debate in Europe
...also known as Moslem Lebensraum...over what to do with returning imported muscle.
The interior ministry estimates around 1,000 people left Germany to join jihadi terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq since 2013. About one-third of these people have already returned to Germany, some of whom have been prosecuted or placed in rehabilitation programs.
A spokesperson from the interior ministry told DW that the bill was not limited to IS and includes all terrorist militias.
"A terrorist militia in the sense of the bill is a paramilitary organized armed association, which aims to violently abolish the structures of a foreign state in violation of international law and replace these structures with a new state or to build state-like structures," the spokesperson said.
That wording means that German dual nationals who join rebel groups such as the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) fighting a three-decades long insurgency against the
The interior ministry hopes that the new law will have a "preventative effect" in the future.
Germany's Nationality Act already includes a similar rule for dual nationals who join "the armed forces or a comparable armed unit" of another country without the permission of the German Defense Ministry.