“Hezbollah for many years has invested in having support networks around the world,” said Matthew Levitt, a former FBI counter-terrorism analyst and author of a book on Hezbollah’s global footprint. “These networks do a variety of different things, including raising funds, sometimes through charity for the organisation, sometimes through illicit financial conduct. They also recruit people, and there are cases in the past few years of Hezbollah actually recruiting people in Germany.”

Blue Mosque

Hassan M was closely tied to an alleged Iranian outpost in Hamburg called the Blue Mosque that intelligence services had monitored since the 1990s. The ornate mosque is still pointed out by sightseeing buses as they drive along a lakeside road dotted with gated houses. Inside, intelligence officials allege the mosque was used as an outpost of the Iranian regime to spread propaganda and support Hezbollah’s activities.

On what was supposedly an open day for mosques across Hamburg, IZH representatives were less than welcoming, stationing themselves “a couple of hundred metres away handing out biscuits and tea”, recalled Ms Pourkian, who has campaigned for the centre’s closure. “We were right in front of the mosque, and they weren’t.”

At another stage she was told by a Hamburg deputy mayor that the mosque had evaded an order to stop arranging buses to Berlin for Quds Day, an annual pro-Palestine and anti-Israel demonstration backed by Iran. The bus stops were apparently moved “a couple of streets away”.

In 2022, the mosque’s deputy head Seyed Mousavifar was deported to Iran because of alleged links to Hezbollah, which has been fully banned in Germany since 2020. Security services went public with their accusations, tying him to a charity called Humans for Humans that was banned in 2021 for being a Hezbollah front organisation. “It was discovered that many people from Hezbollah were coming in and out [of the mosque] and that the deputy head was supporting them,” Ms Pourkian said.

The mosque did not take the allegations lying down. It sued the Hamburg intelligence chiefs who had described it as an Iranian outpost, forcing investigators to lay their evidence on the table and potentially risk exposing sources. “I think that was also a reason why security services then thought, ‘that’s out there now, let’s wait a bit before we issue a ban and then a court tells us that it's not possible’”, Ms Imhof said. In court the spies failed to back up their claim that 50 Hezbollah supporters frequented Friday prayers in Hamburg. The mosque managed to get several other passages struck out of declassified reports.

The breaking point was reached last July, when the German Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser, banned the Islamic Centre of Hamburg and the Blue Mosque’s gates were closed. Police searched 53 properties around Germany, including in Bremen and Lower Saxony, as they followed the trail to possible affiliates.

The worshippers locked out of the mosque say they are victims of a political stand-off who never saw anything untoward and had sought to address concerns about the Islamic Centre. “We take a clear stand against any form of extremism,” said Christian Muhammad Jawad Sandow, a German convert to Islam and a member of the congregation.

Police who supervise the prayers have moved the faithful away from the mosque’s gates to avoid bothering locals on the wealthy street. Mr Sandow said the worshippers were using their prayers, consisting of a Du'a' Kumayl chant on Thursday evenings, as well as a regular Friday gathering, as a form of peaceful protest.

Propaganda machine

A propaganda website run by Yavuz Ozoguz, a German MP’s brother, has rallied opposition to the crackdown. During the raids connected to the Blue Mosque’s closure, he was one of those who got a knock on the door by masked police. As the operator of the website called Muslim Market that shares pro-Iran and anti-Israel content – and where he described Hezbollah in 2020 as “mainly known for its dedication to social policy” – he has been on the radar of German intelligence services for more than two decades.

Mr Ozoguz also runs a publishing house called Eslamica with his brother, Gurhan, which investigators suspected of working for the Islamic Centre of Hamburg. A video offshoot of his website called Muslim TV shows sermons and events from various mosques in Germany, including by Yavuz Özoguz’s son Huseyin.

Necla Kelek, the founder of a group of secular Muslims in Hamburg, described the website as a “petty arm” of the Iranian regime which provides readers with the “necessary ideological outfit”. She said leadership roles in Hamburg were a “career springboard” for those who came and went from Iran.

The Turkish-born Ozoguz brothers have a sister, Aydan Ozoguz, who sits in Germany’s parliament as deputy speaker and a Social Democratic MP and distances herself from her brothers’ views. Approached by The National on the campaign trail for Germany’s February 23 election, she said she supported the crackdown in Hamburg while sympathising with the displaced faithful.

“The ban on this centre is absolutely understandable. It had been prepared for a long time, and I think the fact that they were directly linked to Iran is perfectly clear,” she said, adding that “in some cases there’s no getting around a ban, as I believe is true in this case”.

“But there is something that nobody wants to think about any more, and it’s something that worries me, which is that it was the only centre for Shiites in Hamburg. And they – normal, upstanding Shiites, they exist too – they are now sort of homeless. There are a couple of things that you do have to consider as part of this.”

She drew a parallel with her own legal loss to far-right politician Alexander Gauland, who had called for Ms Ozoguz to be “disposed of” to Turkey, to highlight the difficulty of winning a legal battle with hardliners. “With a ban in the wrong place you can do a lot wrong, so you have to weigh it up very closely.”

After the Hamburg raids, a less measured Yavuz Ozoguz thundered on his website that it was Germany’s “blackest day since the Second World War” as far as religious freedom was concerned. “On July 24, 2024, Germany banned Shiite Islam”, he wrote. This month he said he would consider voting for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to shake things up and promote traditional family values, despite acknowledging it might like to deport him, but ultimately recommended a left-populist party instead.

Doing enough

Although Germany “has really picked up its pace, and has shown a lot less tolerance for Hezbollah militant activity in the country,” it still has to show that suspects are supporting terrorism, Mr Levitt said. “That will limit their ability to shut down some entity, whether it’s a youth organisation or something else, simply because they show some affinity for Hezbollah, if that affinity is for Hezbollah writ large.

"When they get information that people are being radicalised to violence, the German authorities in recent years have shown a predilection to act."

The spy agencies also try to share intelligence on the movements of individuals. “With precisely these networks, they have to make sure, if someone disappears in Hamburg, that they ask if they’ve turned up somewhere else,” Ms Imhof said. “If they haven’t been seen for a few weeks, where are they?”

Yet the network has not disappeared. The Islamic Centre of Hamburg is suing the Interior Ministry in a last-ditch attempt to block the ban. “The whole scene in Hamburg is being monitored. You can’t just stand back now and say it's banned now, they can’t be here any more, so they’ve all gone. That of course is nonsense,” Ms Imhof said.

Its foreign links offers Hezbollah a lifeline at a time when it has suffered a humiliating collapse in Lebanon itself. “There’s been a lot of Hezbollah infrastructure destroyed, a lot of people killed. The dead Hezbollah fighters’ families need to be taken care of, new fighters need to be recruited,” Mr Levitt said. “All that costs money at a time when Hezbollah is on its back foot, Iran is on its back foot, and so while they still get the overwhelming majority of their money from Iran, the expectation is that they will rely even more on their foreign illicit financial networks.”

If Hezbollah could not hide entirely, it has at least made itself hard to pin down. When police entered the Blue Mosque a few weeks after war broke out in the Middle East, the sheer volume of books, flyers, documents, phones and laptops saw the authorities call in the help of Islamic experts who joined in the raids. “We don’t yet know about everything that was found in the raid at the Blue Mosque,” Ms Kelek said.