Islamic State in Europe: the network and doctrine of Millatu Ibrahim

On Wednesday 11th December 2019, the Danish police and intelligence service carried out a large-scale raid based on the suspicion that a group of people were preparing to carry out a terrorist attack in Denmark. In total, 21 individuals were arrested on suspicion of procuring bomb-making materials and attempting to obtain and finance ammunition, silencers, pistols and illegal firearms. One of those arrested was linked to the IS-sympathetic Millatu Ibrahim movement.

These raids were carried out in Amager, Aalborg, Odense, Greve and at several addresses in Copenhagen. Although Millatu Ibrahim was first established in the city of Vejle, it had branches in all the areas across Denmark where arrests were made.

Millatu Ibrahim is an example of a network that draws on ideological influence from the Middle East, but whose organizational roots range across Europe. The individuals who created Millatu Ibrahim in Germany had close links to the Sharia4 movement based in the UK and the Danish Kaldet til Islam movement, one of Millatu Ibrahim’s predecessor organizations in Denmark.

In Europe, networks like Millatu Ibrahim are challenging the “traditional” divide between missionary (da’wa) and jihadist movements. Kaldet til Islam was also originally a proselytizing movement, while Millatu Ibrahim’s Danish Twitter account indicates that their focus is on spreading pamphlets about the meaning of life on the streets of Copenhagen.

Moreover, Millatu Ibrahim’s predecessor movement in Germany, “True Religion” (Die Wahre Religion or DWR), carried out a large-scale Quran distribution campaign in several countries.

Millatu Ibrahim is also an example of a movement that easily crosses national borders. The transnational aspect is seen in the fact that several of the organization’s members travelled to join the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq and also in the group’s international network, which is present in several countries, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France and the UK.

The German roots of Millatu Ibrahim

Before Millatu Ibrahim was created in 2011, from around 2005 the German Salafist scene had experienced a notable growth. During that year, the Palestinian-born Salafist Ibrahim Abu Nagie, a German resident since the early 1980s, created a website for the “True Religion” (DWR) movement, which reportedly attracted more than five million visits in less than eighteen months, to a large extent because its videos were in German (Baehr 2014, p. 237).

From 2008 onwards, DWR experienced a split between its two leading figures at the time.

Referring to the writings of Sayid Qutb and Abu-Muhammad al-Maqdisi, Abu Nagie now openly argued that all those who refused to regard secular state leaders as apostates were to be considered apostates themselves, a position that his DWR co-leader, German convert Pierre Vogel, disagreed with.

Soon, a group of more radical DWR members around Abu Nagie gained the upper hand. It was during this time that Denis Cuspert, an ex-rapper from Berlin who would go on to co-found Millatu Ibrahim in December 2011, appeared in DWR circles, for example, during a 2010 gathering at which he entertained the audience with a religious hymn (nasheed) calling on Muslims to wage armed jihad abroad (Baehr 2014, 237-239).

There are several indications of the close links that existed at this time between a UK-based network known as al-Muhajiroun or the Sharia4-movement, and the DWR in Germany. For instance, in 2010 two German jihadists from Solingen (one of the two founding centres of the Millatu Ibrahim movement), who were part of the DWR network, were stopped by UK border police trying to enter the country with bomb-making plans before being deported back to Germany. In the same year, Germany-based Ismael Salim, who would later become a Millatu Ibrahim member, created the influential Salafi-jihadist website “Salafimedia” and a Youtube channel with the same name. Platforms he ran in direct cooperation with Anjem Choudary, the co-founder of al-Muhajiroun (Baehr 2014, 240; Wiedl 2017, 130).

As already noted, Millatu Ibrahim was created in Berlin in December 2011, to a large extent as an offspring of the DWR. It was founded by two of the most notorious German-speaking jihadists, both of whom would later die as foreign IS fighters in Syria and Iraq: Mohamed Mahmoud, an Austrian citizen who had just moved to Berlin after serving a four-year jail sentence for spreading jihadist online propaganda, and the ex-rapper mentioned earlier, Denis Cuspert.

The link to Denmark

From its foundation, Millatu Ibrahim was able to draw on a ramified network with centres in Berlin and the western German city of Solingen, but it also extended to several other cities, including Frankfurt, Hamburg and the small town of Dinslaken, from where a whole unit of a dozen German IS fighters would later travel to Syria.

Evidence of their first link to Denmark comes from a series of events that took place as early as May 2012. On two occasions, Millatu Ibrahim organized counter-demonstrations to protests held by a small German right-populist party called Pro-NRW, whose members had announced that they would be displaying the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that had appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. Both counter-demonstrations escalated into violence, leaving two police officers who had been attacked with a knife severely injured (Baehr 2014, 240-41).

Only a month later, in June 2012, Millatu Ibrahim was outlawed by the German Ministry of the Interior, accompanied by a series of raids of the organization’s offices and leading members’ homes. Even after its banning, however, the movement remained alive, in particular through its online activities. From his Egyptian exile, co-founder Mahmoud in particular continued to produce jihadist propaganda material. After the German government’s crackdown, many of its members decided to follow their leaders and leave the country, leading to Egypt becoming a bridgehead for Millatu Ibrahim’s German jihadists.

Mahmoud’s companion and Millatu Ibrahim co-founder Cuspert is thought to have travelled from here to Syria at some point in 2013, whereas Mahmoud crossed the Turkish border into Syria in 2014.

In 2012, the same year that Millatu Ibrahim was banned in Germany, the first link can be observed between the German and Danish branches of the organization. In a YouTube-video, the founder of Millatu Ibrahim in Germany, Mohamed Mahmoud, called on Muslims to revenge Aafia Siddiqui,who in 2003 joined AQ and in 2008 got arrested and allegedly mistreated.

The important detail here is that Mahmoud appeared in front of the banner of the Danish branch of Millatu Ibrahim. A couple of years later, in 2014, the Danish citizen Ömer Kücükavci confessed to having been recruited by the Danish branch of Millatu Ibrahim to fight for IS in Syria. Two years later the Danish branch was in the news again when one of its members, Mesa Hodzic, was critically injured in a shoot-out in Christiania in a drugs-related conflict and later died.

Hodzic, though a member of the Danish branch of Millatu Ibrahim, also sympathized with IS. However, although IS claimed responsibility for the shoot-out in Christiania, the Danish police denied there was any connection.

Especially in 2014-2015, the Danish branch of Millatu Ibrahim actively spread propaganda in the larger Danish cities, including Copenhagen. Moreover, the group uploaded several videos on YouTube on which Adam Johansen, also known as Abu Abdurrahman, spokesperson for the Danish branch, preached anti-democratic values and urged all Danish Muslims not to vote in the general elections. He ended the video by praising IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Johansen was later arrested on charges of having fought for and received military training from IS.

Millatu Ibrahim as an anti-democracy jihadist doctrine

An interesting aspect of Millatu Ibrahim as a network is that it represents a particular interpretation of religious doctrines that has inspired both AQ and IS sympathizers. Theologically, the concept of ‘Millat Ibrahim’ is a common source of inspiration for various jihadist cells and smaller groups that might differ in strategy and method, yet align themselves with the ‘transnational’ agenda of IS without being directly controlled by a central leadership.

The group's name, Millatu Ibrahim, can be traced back to a book of the same name by Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (born 1959), a Jordanian of Palestinian descent who is one of the world’s leading Salafi-jihadist ideologues. Maqdisi’s book has been an important source of inspiration for the global jihadist movement, including the al-Qaeda branch in Iraq led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after the US-led invasion in 2003. The term Millat Ibrahim (“the religion of Abraham”) appears several times in the Quran (e.g. Q 2:135; 3:65; 3:95), referring to Abraham as a role model in faith due to his obedience to God’s word and disavowal of idolatry.

Unlike, for instance, Salafi groups who focus purely on preaching (i.e. da'wa), Maqdisi draws several parallels between the form of idolatry that was dominant at the time of the Prophet Abraham and the man-made laws of “apostate” regimes both within and outside Muslim countries. At the political level, this loyalty and adherence (wala’) to divine law and struggle against unbelief becomes, for Maqdisi, a call to renounce (bara’) ‘infidel legislation’, including democracy, through actions, and not merely through words.

Hence Maqdisi, like the AQ leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, for instance, considers jihad not only a requisite duty of every Muslim (fard ‘ayn), but also an act of worship sanctioned by a divine mandate against the ‘evil’ forces of tyranny, both within and outside Muslim-ruled territories. In operational terms, this strategy has been transformed into an expanded approach to jihad that entirely transcends national borders.

Further reading:

Al-Maqdisi, Abu Muhammad. 1985. Millat Ibrahim (“The Religion of Abraham”). At-Tibyan Publications.

Baehr, Dirk. 2014. "Dschihadistischer Salafismus in Deutschland." In Salafismus in Deutschland : Ursprünge und Gefahren einer islamisch-fundamentalistischen Bewegung, edited by Thorsten Gerald Schneiders. Bielefeld, [Germany: transcript].

Pantucci, Raffaello. 2015. Al-Muhajiroun’s European Recruiting Pipeline. CTC Sentinel 8 (8).

Wiedl, Nina. 2017. Zeitgenössische Rufe zum Islam: Salafitische Da'wa in Deutschland, 2002-2011. Vol. 1. Nomos Verlag.

Wagemakers, Joas: A Purist-Jihadi Salafi: The Ideology of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (August 2009), pp. 281-297.