Unlike France, whose President Francois Hollande has declared war on terrorism, von der Leyen does not consider Germany to be at war as IS is not a state, but rather a “band of murderers”.
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She said Germany would contribute an unspecified number of Panavia Tornado ECR reconnaissance aircraft to gather more intelligence on Islamic State militants in Syria and to protect civilians.
“Germany will make a more active contribution” that includes deploying reconnaissance Tornados in Syria, Henning Otte, a lawmaker with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said in an e-mailed statement.
Germany sent military units to Kurdistan earlier this year in order to train Kurdish Peshmerga forces in the war against Daesh.
IS “can’t be convinced with words, it must be fought with military means”, she added. Last year, Berlin agreed to send arms to the Kurds.
But a Forsa poll on Wednesday put her conservative bloc up three points at 39 percent due to the effect of the Paris attacks, which Forsa’s chief said drives voters back to the incumbent party.
“If the French president asks me to think about what we can do beyond that, then it’s our task to consider it – and we will react very quickly”, she said.
German officials said that Merkel saw the bigger German role as a necessary price to pay in exchange for Hollande’s continued support in the refugee crisis.
His views are in contrast to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has consistently resisted the idea of imposing strict caps on the number of refugees.
European countries can not accept any more refugees, the French prime minister has been quoted as saying.
Instead of letting thousands of migrants into the European Union in an uncontrolled manner, Valls advocated Europe finding a solution to deal with the problem.
“You have undisputed German power in the economic realm, but Germany is not going to be in a position, at least in the short term, to provide security for Europe, so that will have to rest with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and especially within Europe, the United Kingdom and France”, said Daniel Fiott, a researcher at the Institute for European Studies at VUB in Brussels.
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“Risks are present. It is without any doubt a unsafe mission. But there are also defense mechanisms set up by the coalition, which has been conducting attacks for a year and we know that not a single aircraft has been downed”, she said.
