According to the SITE Intelligence Group, the teenager went on to threaten more Islamic State attacks "in every village, city and airport." The "welcoming culture" that defined Germany last year during the migrant influx has largely disappeared, and Monday's attack could mark another significant development in the country's public debate about refugees.

“Anti-immigration and Islamophobic opinions in the German population will grow, and there is a high risk of attacks on refugee centers in the coming weeks and months,” said Daniel Koehler, director of Germany’s Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies and a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

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“The current right-wing populist, extremist and anti-immigration movement will experience another surge in support. They will try to capitalize on this,” he said.

Skepticism of refugees had risen particularly after the sexual assaults of about 1,200 women on New Year's Eve, which put the country into a shock mode for weeks and sparked a backlash against refugees after authorities said many of the suspects were asylum seekers from North Africa.

So far, concerns focused primarily on young male refugees who had come to the country alone. Monday's ax attack has raised new questions about whether German authorities are too overwhelmed to provide adequate support for those refugees, particularly for unaccompanied minors.

Authorities in Bavaria, the southern German region where the train attack occurred, said Tuesday that they had put a particular focus on Salafist recruitment of unaccompanied minors for months. It was unclear whether those efforts had been a product of specific information indicating that recruiters were targeting minors, or whether they were part of more general precautions.

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"Maybe we need to take care of unaccompanied minors even more so that they can overcome their trauma," said Friedhelm Hofmann, the bishop of Wuerzburg, which is located near where the attacker lived. Hofmann was quoted by local newspapers as saying that it would be wrong to view all asylum seekers with suspicion in the wake of the attack.

But Koehler believes that the likelihood of similar attacks in the future is high, partially because Germany’s counterterrorism efforts lack a coherent strategy that would have to necessarily include more psychological counseling. “The authorities are well aware of the potential risks of overcrowded refugee centers, constant right-wing attacks, lack of perspectives, long bureaucratic procedures and Salafists trying to recruit in these facilities,” he said.

But calls for better training for volunteers and social workers on how to spot the initial signs of radicalization have been turned down. For months, authorities struggled to even provide food and shelter to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who arrived last year.

Germany took in more than 1 million refugees last year alone. Although the number of unaccompanied minors who fled to the country and are officially registered is much lower and stands at about 52,000, there are increasing concerns that younger refugees in particular are at high risk of becoming radicalized. Monday's attack appears to be the first committed by an underage asylum seeker.

When a 15-year-old girl who allegedly expressed sympathies for the Islamic State stabbed a police officer in Hanover in March, authorities considered it an isolated incident. Since then, however, there are growing signs that the problem of youth radicalization is more widespread than previously assumed.

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In April, several people were injured when a bomb exploded in a Sikh temple in the western town of Essen, and authorities say two 16-year-olds and one 17-year-old were behind the attack. The three suspects are believed to have had ties to the Salafist community in Essen.

Although most of the underage suspects were not refugees, authorities are concerned that young refugees might be a prime target for recruiters and online propaganda.

Those concerns emerged much earlier. In September 2015, Burkhard Freier, the head of North-Rhine Westphalia's state intelligence agency, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper: Refugees "go through exceptional circumstances and seek shelter and inclusion into a society. This is what Salafists exploit to attract young refugees for their cause."

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Koehler said the recent incidents constitute a new but hardly surprising phenomenon in Germany. An Islamic State recruitment handbook, for instance, advises sympathizers to target young adults or teenagers. “In a way ISIL has tried to turn their youngest recruit generation, which was originally being prepared to join the caliphate, into human weapons,” he said, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic State and referring to the group’s decreasing footprint in Syria and Iraq.

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Although many refugees flee from Syria and Iraq to escape violence and radicalism, authorities in Germany and elsewhere fear that underage asylum seekers, in particular, may nevertheless be more vulnerable to radicalization in Europe. “Fleeing from a war zone and leaving your family behind is a highly traumatic experience, which could act as a driving factor for radicalization,” Koehler said.