Key points
- 15.2 million euros paid between 2013 and 2020 by the German Federal Foreign Office to Islamic Relief Deutschland, despite an explicit exclusion decided in 2009.
- About 240,000 euros carried in cash, over five flights, between Germany and Turkey, with a letter of accreditation drafted from a draft supplied by the beneficiary.
- The domestic intelligence service (BfV) and the foreign intelligence service (BND) both raised the alarm; the ministry overrode them.
- Bundesrechnungshof audit classified for six years, declassified in February 2026 after the Federal Administrative Court ruling (September 10, 2025) obtained by the Berlin lawyer Seyran Ateş.
An audit by the German Federal Court of Audit (Bundesrechnungshof), classified for six years and published after the long legal battle waged by the lawyer Seyran Ateş, documents the German Federal Foreign Office's complacency toward Islamic Relief Deutschland: 15.2 million euros in grants, a suitcase of cash carried to Turkey, warnings from two intelligence services brushed aside, decisive documents vanished from the archives.
On January 22, 2015, in Berlin, an email reaches the humanitarian division of the German Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt, AA). It comes from Islamic Relief Deutschland (IRD), for two years a recipient of federal grants for health projects in Syria. The organization, based in Cologne, reports a “problem.” Its operational partner, the Deutsch-Syrischer Verein zur Förderung der Freiheit und Menschenrechte, can no longer transfer money to Turkey: the banks refuse any transaction mentioning “Syria.” The solution proposed by IRD is to carry the cash physically, in a suitcase, from Germany to Turkey.
An AA official expresses his reservations in an internal email: “In my view, it would be difficult to issue such a letter, since we cannot rule out the possibility of misuse.” Six days later, on January 28, 2015, the ministry nonetheless issues a letter of accreditation to the German customs authorities. The text of that letter is a draft supplied by Islamic Relief Deutschland itself. Three and a half years later, in June 2018, the Federal Court of Audit would establish that about 240,000 euros were in fact carried in cash, over five flights between 2014 and 2015. The ministry never asked about the final destination of these funds.
This episode is one of the salient points of an audit file that the Bundesrechnungshof, the German equivalent of a national audit court, delivered in December 2019. The audit was classified under the marking “VS - nur für den Dienstgebrauch,” strictly for internal use. It remained so for more than six years. Its declassification, in February 2026, was obtained following the Federal Administrative Court ruling handed down on September 10, 2025, which held that the German state's years-long refusal to publish rested on “irrelevant considerations.” The German press (WELT am Sonntag, Report Mainz/ARD), the Berlin lawyer Seyran Ateş and the expert Sigrid Herrmann (AK Polis) published its main findings in May 2026.
A “no” in 2009, millions from 2013 onward
In January 2009, the head of the ministry's Humanitarian Aid working group writes to her team: “We do nothing with Islamic Relief! Let this be clear: no grants, no inclusion in the Coordination Committee.” That same year, the annual report of the Baden-Württemberg Office for the Protection of the Constitution publicly establishes the links between Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), IRD's British parent based in Birmingham, and the Muslim Brotherhood movement. In July, the ministry formally queries the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) for “up-to-date and detailed” information. The reply, and all the correspondence that followed, is absent from the archives. The Federal Court of Audit will fail to locate it.
In 2013, with no document shedding light on the reversal, the ministry begins funding Islamic Relief Deutschland for projects in Syria. On August 7 of that same year, the first volume of the ministry's IRD file, covering the period 1994-2006, is destroyed. It contained the correspondence with the intelligence services. The Federal Court settles on the phrase: “the decisive reasons for the change of opinion on the most important question under grant law, in this file, remain obscure.”
The justification produced by the administration, in an instruction memo of April 9, 2013, invokes “Islamic Relief's good reputation as a humanitarian NGO.” The Bundesrechnungshof responds to it, nearly seven years later: “The ministry is unable to explain on what basis it reached the assessment that Islamic Relief had a good reputation as a humanitarian NGO. In January 2009, on the contrary, it had categorically refused any cooperation.”
Two intelligence services overruled
Between 2013 and 2020, the German Federal Foreign Office pays 15.2 million euros to Islamic Relief Deutschland for five projects in Syria. The Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) adds 965,040 euros. These grants come as the warnings pile up.
In January 2017, in response to a written question from the Green MP Volker Beck, the German government officially acknowledges “close ties” between IRD and the Islamische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland (IGD), an organization that German domestic intelligence describes as the “most important and most central of the Muslim Brotherhood's supporters in Germany.” In October 2018, the ministry's Syria country desk, AS-SYR, internally alerts its own humanitarian division. The memo from that meeting is explicit: IRD's “proximity to the Muslim Brotherhood, confirmed by the BfV,” justifies fundamental exclusion; and the funding, “even when used correctly for humanitarian purposes, can lead to inadvertent support for the Muslim Brotherhood's charitable structures in Syria.” The Federal Court of Audit notes that this memo “was filed neither in the policy file nor in the project file.” It has vanished from the archives.
It is only in April 2019, following a parliamentary question from the liberal FDP group, that the German state admits that both Islamic Relief Worldwide and Islamic Relief Deutschland have “significant personal ties to the Muslim Brotherhood or to organizations related to it.” The funding then ceases, six years after it began.
A section of the audit report left unredacted delivers a decisive piece of information: not only had the domestic intelligence service (BfV) raised the alarm, but so had the foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). In a passage that the officials in charge of the redactions failed to black out, one reads: “Despite the BND's warnings, and thus contrary to its own guidelines, the ministry likewise affirmed IRD's eligibility as a grant recipient.” Two German intelligence services gave warning; the ministry overrode them.
An opaque financial architecture
The problem, from a budgetary standpoint, does not lie only in the amounts. It lies in the architecture of the funding. Islamic Relief Deutschland, according to the report, carried out none of the Syrian projects itself. All were transferred to partners: Islamic Relief Worldwide in Birmingham, Islamic Relief Turkey in the border city of Gaziantep, and the Deutsch-Syrischer Verein, a German-Syrian association whose operational responsibilities remain unclear. In two of the four audited projects, IRD passed the funds to partners without the AA's grant notification authorizing it. The ministry, which should have imposed sanctions, did not.
IRD was moreover paying, out of its own donation revenues, about 4 million euros a year to Islamic Relief Worldwide. Between 2011 and 2025, 152 million euros thus flowed from the German subsidiary to the British parent. The Federal Court of Audit documents, over the period examined, specific transfers from IRD to the “Islamic Relief Academy” in the United Kingdom (100,000 euros in 2014, 150,000 euros in 2015), on top of contributions to IRW conferences in Turkey and Yemen. “The ministry never asked about the purpose of these donations,” the audit writes.
Islamic Relief Worldwide was designated a terrorist organization by the Israeli Ministry of Defense and banned from Israel in 2014 (a decision confirming an initial act of 2008), on the grounds that it was part of “Hamas's financial system.” Islamic Relief disputes this, and the matter remains pending before the Israeli courts. To date, in May 2026, the German Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz maintains that “significant personal ties still exist between Islamic Relief Deutschland and the Muslim Brotherhood.” This assertion contradicts IRD's current defense, put forward by its law firm Höcker: “our client has no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.”
When the state fears “controversy”
The dossier's second front is not budgetary but democratic. Although the audit was delivered in December 2019, the public had access to it only in February 2026. The German administration, under three successive foreign ministers (Heiko Maas, SPD; Annalena Baerbock, Greens; Johann Wadephul, CDU), refused to publish it.
The grounds invoked deserve attention. Before the Berlin Administrative Court, the federal authorities defended the confidential character of the reports by arguing that their publication “could lead to controversy” and that “there was a risk that discussions would be steered in a direction unfavorable to the interests of the federal government.” Administrative withholding is here justified not by the protection of a defense secret, but by the fear of an unfavorable public debate.
Seyran Ateş, a Berlin lawyer of Turkish origin, who in 2017 founded the liberal Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque (the first mosque in Europe where women pray alongside men and may serve as imam), has lived under police protection since 2006 on account of more than a hundred death threats. With the support of the Institut für Weltanschauungsrecht, she filed an appeal in February 2021 against the withholding of the report. It took more than four years to arrive, on September 10, 2025, at a Federal Administrative Court ruling that held the withholding rested on “irrelevant considerations.” The reports were then declassified.
An organization still a member of the Coordination Committee
March 2026. Three months after declassification, two months before the press coverage, Islamic Relief Deutschland still appears, spelled out in full, on the official list of members of the Humanitarian Aid Coordination Committee, the central committee steered by the Foreign Office. The Federal Court of Audit had nonetheless been explicit: “the ministry should not have granted this status to IRD in view of its own guideline.” The administration's defense rests on IRD's certification by the European Commission's ECHO Directorate-General. The Federal Court replies curtly that “the European Union followed its own rules” and that this “has no bearing on the instructions concerning the findings under constitutional-protection law.”
A lesson for France
The German case is instructive. It brings to light a mechanism whose existence researchers working on the Muslim Brotherhood movement have long known, without being able to demonstrate its financial and administrative workings in detail. A European democracy equips itself, through its law, with strict rules to exclude from public grants any organization with a link to a political-religious network placed under constitutional surveillance. Its central administration ignores these rules for seven years. The audit court establishes it, the political power classifies the report, a lawyer litigates, the higher administrative justice rules, the press publishes.
France must read this dossier closely. Muslim Brotherhood structures have operated there for several decades. Several of them benefit, directly or indirectly, from public funding: the state, local authorities, European operators. The audits concerning them, where they exist, are almost never made public. The French Interior Ministry has, to date, not followed the British example of the Commission of Inquiry on the Muslim Brotherhood (2014-2015). French administrative culture traditionally favors discretion; the German dossier shows that such discretion can, over time, become passive complicity, and that it is legally contestable in a democracy.
The Muslim Brotherhood, in its European strategy of Islamization from below, has never bet on head-on confrontation with states. It has bet on its ability to penetrate institutions through the seemingly neutral channel of humanitarian, educational and charitable work. When this penetration is documented, in official figures, by a state audit report, the question goes beyond security: it engages the sovereignty of democratic budgetary choices.
Six years of classification of an audit document, a quarter of a million euros carried in cash without control, 152 million euros transferred with no question as to their purpose from the German subsidiary to the British parent, two intelligence services ignored, a central administration pleading before a court that disclosing the facts “could lead to controversy”: this dossier is no longer humanitarian alone. It is political. And it now concerns the whole of Europe.
Source and structure of the article
The analysis draws on the investigation published by Seyran Ateş, a member of the Berlin bar, and Sigrid Herrmann, of the Arbeitskreis Politischer Islam (AK Polis), on May 23, 2026, under the German title:
[Translation: Bringing the case to light - the German Federal Foreign Office and Islamic Relief: millions of euros of German taxpayers' money sent “flying blind” (Court of Audit) to a war-torn Middle East.]
The dossier draws on the declassified passages of the Bundesrechnungshof audit report (December 2019), the documents from the ministry's administrative file and the material produced by the proceedings S. Ateş brought before the federal administrative courts. The investigation unfolds in six sequences.
- Narrative entry point. The suitcase-of-cash episode (January 2015): 240,000 euros carried over five flights to Turkey, under cover of a letter of accreditation drafted from a draft supplied by Islamic Relief Deutschland.
- Chronology of the reversal. From the categorical refusal of 2009 (“We do nothing with Islamic Relief”) to the start of funding in 2013, with no administrative record documenting the shift in doctrine.
- Financial architecture. Full delegation of project implementation to Islamic Relief Worldwide (Birmingham), Islamic Relief Turkey (Gaziantep) and the Deutsch-Syrischer Verein; parallel transfers from IRD to IRW amounting to 152 million euros between 2011 and 2025.
- Warnings brushed aside. Alerts from the domestic intelligence service (BfV) and the foreign service (BND); missing documents from the file - the 1994-2006 volume destroyed, the internal AS-SYR memo never filed.
- Legal battle. S. Ateş's appeal in February 2021 with the support of the Institut für Weltanschauungsrecht; the Federal Administrative Court ruling of September 10, 2025; declassification of the audit in February 2026.
- Present situation. Islamic Relief Deutschland still a member of the Humanitarian Aid Coordination Committee steered by the Foreign Office as of March 2026.
The investigation also draws on an earlier assessment by Remko Leemhuis, director of AJC Berlin, on the possible benefits to Hamas-linked structures via German Federal Foreign Office funds passing through Islamic Relief:
Dr Florence Bergeaud-Blackler
Anthropologist, Research Fellow at the CNRS (HDR)
Founding President of CERIF - European Center for Research and Information on the Muslim Brotherhood
cerif.eu