The Belgian connections to Islamic radicalism

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/16/belgium-connections-extremism-verviers

Version 0 of 1.

Two days before 9/11, in the foothills of the Hindu Kush, Osama bin Laden pulled off one of his boldest assassinations. And there was a Belgian connection. Two “Belgian journalists” had been in the Panjshir valley of northern Afghanistan for weeks, supposedly waiting to interview Ahmad Shah Massoud, the so-called Lion of the Panjshir, leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, an al-Qaida adversary.

The killers, Tunisians, arrived bearing Belgian passports, posing as journalists for a Belgian TV station. When they were eventually granted their audience, their cameras turned out to be packed with explosives.

Islamic radicalism has a long pedigree in Belgium. The country’s geography makes it easy to travel back and forth between France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Verviers, the town where on Thursday police killed two Belgian “foreign fighters” not long back from Syria, bestrides the Dutch and German borders. Like much of Francophone eastern and southern Belgium, it is a town down on its luck. Its heyday as a centre of the textiles and wool business is long gone. Now it is one of the poorest towns in the country, and 20% of its population of 55,000 is of immigrant origin.

Brussels was the scene of the first of the much-predicted terrorist attacks in Europe by jihadists returning home from Syria. Less than a year ago on one of the city’s ritziest squares, a Frenchman of Moroccan origin opened fire with a Kalashnikov at the Jewish museum, killing four.

North of Verviers, across Belgium’s linguistic frontier in the main Flemish and Dutch-speaking city of Antwerp, 46 people are on trial for membership of a radical organisation known as Sharia4Belgium. Many of those on trial have also been in Syria, and the organisation – which called for Belgium to become a caliphate – was viewed as a recruiting and indoctrination centre for sending young European Muslims to fight in foreign jihads, according to the prosecution. It is the biggest prosecution of alleged Islamist radicals currently taking place in Europe.

Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s counter-terrorism co-ordinator, has said Belgium produces more foreign fighters for Syria per head than any other EU country – around 300 so far from a country of 11 million. Britain is said to have produced twice that number but has more than five times the population.

Of those estimated 300, 101 have come back, according to Hans Bonte, the mayor of Vilvoorde, on the fringes of Brussels. He told the newspaper De Standaard that around half of the 101 were not being watched by the security services. He blamed the highly decentralised, at times dysfunctional structures of the Belgian state – a claim contradicted by the apparent efficacy of Thursday’s operations.

The two men killed in Verviers – whose identities have not been confirmed - are said by local media to have been well-known militants with Islamist noms de guerre. Pictures circulating on Belgian websites allegedly show the pair, both of them in fighting postures.

As long ago as 2008, US researchers from a group called 9/11 Finding Answers identified Verviers as a hotbed of radical Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas adherents. In Jalhay, in the forests of the Ardennes south-east of Verviers, there was a training camp for Belgian and Dutch jihadis, according to Belgian media reports on Friday.

For the past year, as the Islamic State burst across Iraq and Syria bolstered by Europeans flocking to its ranks, security officials in the EU have been at a loss over how to deal with the return of the foreign fighters. Events in Belgium, it seems, are vindicating those fears.

The impact on public opinion might be evident on Saturday. The anti-Muslim marches that have been taking place in Germany in recent weeks are set to branch out, with Antwerp hosting its own Pegida demonstration against the alleged Islamification of Europe.