Merkel: Recent Attacks Do Not Make Me Regret Accepting Refugees
An Afghan refugee launched an ax attack on a train in Wurzburg. A suicide bomber detonated himself outside a migration center in Ansbach. A Syrian refugee killed a pregnant woman with a machete in Reutlingen. A disgruntled teenager shot and killed nine people in Munich.
In July, young men attacked Germany four times over the course of seven days. Three of those incidents were carried out by asylum-seekers. The violent spate has put Berlin — where Chancellor Angela Merkel led the call for European nations to accept refugees — on the defensive about why she has accepted hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers fleeing war zones, only to later be attacked by a small handful of them.
On Thursday, in a press conference in Berlin, the powerful German leader said that despite recent attacks, she does not regret her push to accept refugees, and instead believes that not accepting them in such masses “could have led to even worse consequences.”
The assailants who used their time in Germany to plan and launch attacks, “shamed the country that welcomed them,” she said. But the attacks, two of which are believed to have had extremist motives, simply prove that the Islamic State took advantage of the refugee crisis to smuggle terrorists into Europe, including to Germany and France. It is for that reason, she said, that “internal and external security can no longer be distinguished from each other.”
“We unfortunately have to accept that many Islamist fighters from Europe have gone to Syria,” she said.
Merkel used her appearance at the press conference to announce that the recent attacks would be analyzed in order to determine what steps will keep Germany safe.
“I said back then, and I’ll say it again, Germany is a strong country,” she said. “I called it a task for the whole nation. But just as we’ve managed so much already, we’ll manage this.”
Getty Images: JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images
