The associations “Mezopotamien Verlag und Vertrieb GmbH” and “MIR Multimedia GmbH” have been banned under the Act Governing Private Associations (Vereinsgesetz, Section 3 (1) & (3), in conjunction with Sections 17 and 18, first sentence). Enforcement of the ban has been underway in North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony since the early hours of the morning. Search warrants have been used and items have been confiscated.

Mezopotamien Verlag and IR Multimedia will now be closed and forbidden to operate on the grounds that they are part of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an organization banned in Germany since 1993.

The ban is part of regular government measures to combat the PKK, which is listed as a terrorist organization by the Federal Court of Justice. Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer said, "Since the PKK is still active despite the ban in Germany, it is absolutely right to put the PKK in its place and uphold the law".

A search of their offices confirmed that these two associations existed solely to provide organisational support to the PKK, under the guise of a publishing company. Their financial revenue was used to facilitate operations of the terrorist organization in Germany and Europe over the long term. This systematically undermined the ban on the PKK.

With some 14,500 members, the PKK is by far the largest foreign extremist organization in Germany. It uses Germany as a retreat – a place to refinance and recruit.

The German security authorities invest considerable human and material resources in trying to prevent this. Since 2004, law enforcement authorities of the federal states have opened PKK-related criminal investigations into a very high number of cases, running well into the thousands.

The Federal Public Prosecutor General has so far led 180 such criminal investigations. Since 1992, over 70 sentences have been handed down to over 90 defendants as a result of cases brought by the Federal Public Prosecutor through the higher regional courts against PKK functionaries in Germany.

And since 1993, the German federal and state authorities have banned not just the PKK itself but another 52 organizations connected to it. In 2008, the Federal Ministry of the Interior banned Roj TV, the PKK’s TV station, from broadcasting in Germany.