Islamic State in Germany: Salaried Veterans, Unpaid Volunteers

Convicted by his own payslips

On October 6, Munich's Higher Regional Court sentenced Ali H., a 48-year-old Iraqi from Augsburg, to three years and three months in prison for membership in a foreign terrorist organisation. According to the court, he worked from May 2016 to October 2017 in a workshop serving the Islamic State's armed forces, and was paid for it. He denied everything. The judges relied mainly on the "IS lists", which the caliphate used to pay its staff and which the FBI handed to Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). His four names appear there in the right order, along with his tribal name. A Federal Court of Justice ruling on his detention adds that the organisation filed him under a ten-digit census number and paid at least $3,707 in wages and family allowance for him, his wife and their children.

Recalling the Islamic State's massacres of Yazidis and Shiites, the court treated its brutality as an aggravating factor. The judge noted that a confession would have earned a much shorter sentence. The verdict is not final. The caliphate abolished many freedoms, but never the payslip.

The caliphate's archives, now in Wiesbaden

Ali H. is no isolated case. According to NDR, WDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the BKA holds about 400 lists seized in the Islamic State's guesthouses, pay offices and hospitals, with nearly two million entries. The most valuable is a payroll of some 50,000 names captured by US forces near Mosul, complete with noms de guerre, census numbers, birth dates and units. By April, after checking less than half of the payroll, it had identified about 75 suspected former members in Germany, and six had been convicted. Nearly 20,000 names have also been fed into border databases. In 2014, the Islamic State bulldozed the border between Iraq and Syria to celebrate the end of borders. Its own paperwork now helps guard Europe's.

Recruitment drive: one yes, the rest no

The caliphate's heirs need no payroll. On September 17, federal prosecutors had a 24-year-old Iraqi arrested in Eberswalde, near Berlin. They say he shares the Islamic State's ideology and, since spring 2025, had planned attacks on people he considered infidels. He had obtained a firearm and scouted a church in Bremen, meant to be his group's first target. The group never quite formed: he found one accomplice, still unidentified.

"Attempts to recruit further individuals had failed."— Germany's federal prosecutors, September 17, 2026

He came to Germany in 2021 through a Brandenburg humanitarian programme for vulnerable refugees who had fled to Jordan, selected with the UN refugee agency. In Bremen, a Protestant spokesman said prosecutors had described "rather an intention than a concrete plan", and the Catholic parishes made it clear that their churches would stay open.

The volunteers keep applying. On October 1, police in North Rhine-Westphalia detained three Islamist suspects, a German convert and two Syrians, over alleged attack plans with signs of proximity to the Islamic State. A court freed the two Syrians the next morning. On October 8, federal prosecutors were weighing whether to take over the case.

Ten weeks of distance

The volunteers do not always fail. On July 25, a 21-year-old Berliner drove a van into the crowd near the city's Pride parade, killing a 65-year-old Polish woman and injuring between 29 and 31 people, depending on the count. A video recorded that day on his phone shows a masked man, presumed to be him, pledging allegiance to the Islamic State. Police shot him dead the next day. In May, a Berlin juvenile court had sentenced him to 22 months for trying to join the Islamic State via Lebanon in 2025, then let him go on a form of preliminary probation. It had found his travel plans "dilettantish" and taken note of his distancing from the Islamic State at trial, while admitting that further offences could not be ruled out. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt called the decision "certainly incomprehensible". Under a plan adopted by the government on September 16, juvenile courts are to grant such probation only if public safety does not stand in the way. Until now, they could grant it even when it did.

Isolated incidents, continued

For readers who still believe in isolated incidents, a selection from barely a month, in Germany alone:

• September 9: federal prosecutors charged a Syrian with having urged on the man who stabbed a Spanish tourist at Berlin's Holocaust memorial in February 2025, and who got 13 years in March.
• September 11: seven alleged Hamas members were charged in Berlin with procuring weapons for attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets in Germany or Austria, planned for the second anniversary of October 7.
• September 11: a Düsseldorf court gave two Iraqi brothers four years each for IS membership, again on the strength of the caliphate's payroll lists. It noted that they had joined after being persecuted by Shiite militias.
• September 16: Frankfurt prosecutors charged a 26-year-old Iraqi who allegedly joined IS as a teenager in 2014, identified through the same lists.
• September 21: a 21-year-old went on trial in Bremen for travelling to Syria in 2025, where IS allegedly trained him on an AK-47.
• September 29: Dresden prosecutors announced charges against four Iraqis for IS membership between 2014 and 2017.
• September 30 and October 1: two more alleged former IS members were arrested, in Hesse and Thuringia.
• October 2: a 37-year-old was arrested in Dresden on suspicion of trying to join IS and preparing a terrorist offence.
• October 5: an 18-year-old Syrian went on trial in Hamburg, accused of planning to kill "infidels" in a shopping centre, a bar or a police station.

The caliphate's veterans were paid in dollars, on payslips that now convict them. Its new volunteers are paid in promises of paradise, which no court can seize.