Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and their Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partners have agreed a plan to strip some Germans who fight for the Daesh militant group of their citizenship.
More than 1,000 Germans have left their country for war zones in the Middle East since 2013 and the government has been debating how to deal with them as US-backed forces are poised to take the last patch of territory from Daesh in Syria.
Germany has maintained that it will use the blanket method to strip all the militants of their citizenship but rather will follow three-point criteria to denaturalize Germans that have taken arms to fight for the extremist group.
Such individuals must have second citizenship and be adults. They would be stripped of their citizenship should they fight for Daesh after the new rules come into effect. The decision comes after Britain revoked the citizenship of Shamima Begum, a teenager who had left London when she was aged 15 to join Daesh in Syria.
