My
journey through Molenbeek
A
former US counterterrorism official says a recent visit shows why
ISIL is thriving in Europe.
By MATTHEW LEVITT
3/28/16, 7:18 AM CET
BRUSSELS—The
office of the mayor of Molenbeek municipality sits alongside a
picturesque, typically European cobblestone square. Across the
square, within plain view of the municipal government, sits the
family home of Salah Abdeslam, the Islamic State terrorist who was
finally captured two weeks ago after evading authorities since the
November Paris attacks.
Nothing separates
the two buildings, but they are a world apart.
This is the
bifurcated Brussels I saw when, coincidentally, I was in Belgium a
few days before the terrorist attacks that killed 31 people and
wounded hundreds. I was there to meet with senior counterterrorism,
intelligence and law enforcement officials, as well as with local
officials in the troubled municipality of Molenbeek, the subsection
of Brussels where Abdeslam grew up and which even Molenbeek’s
mayor, Francois Schepmans, describes as “a breeding ground for
violence.”
The harsh fact is
that a terrorist safe haven exists in the heart of the capital of the
European Union, and no one quite knows what to do about it. During
the course of my day I first rode a few quick stops on the Brussels
metro from my hotel in the EU district to Molenbeek, where I met the
mayor at her office together with police chiefs, members of the local
police department’s “counter-radicalization cell,” and civilian
“prevention officers” who had just concluded their weekly
status-check on the local government’s counter-radicalization, and
social integration efforts. Their goal seems Sisyphean: reintegrating
returning foreign terrorist fighters back into society and preventing
still more disenfranchised Muslim youth from looking to the Islamic
State for purpose and belonging.
The problem:
Molenbeek is like another world, another culture, festering in the
heart of the West. In Brussels only eight of 114 Imams in Brussels
speak any of the local languages. The majority Muslim municipality of
about 100,000 people is the second poorest in the country, with the
second youngest population, high unemployment and crime rates, and a
nearly 10% annual population turnover that makes it a highly
transient community. By some accounts, nearly a third of Molenbeek
residents are unemployed.
Unsurprisingly,
Molenbeek has become an almost ideal recruiting ground for Islamic
State, and Belgium has the hightest number per capita of Western
foreign fighters who have traveled to join the Islamic State in Syria
and Iraq (and, more recently, Libya).] And the majority of these came
from Brussels, and Molenbeek in particular, according to Interior
Minister Jan Jambon. The local municipalit has been described as one
of a few Islamic State “hotbeds of recruitment” around the world.
In the words of Belgian Prime Minster Charles Michel, “Almost every
time, there is a link to Molenbeek.” This week’s bombings were no
exception.
Recruiters offer a
sense of family to people from broken homes; of belonging to people
who feel disenfranchised from society; of empowerment to people who
feel discriminated against; and of a higher calling and purpose to
people who feel adrift. Recruiters pitch small groups of friends and
family together: “You don’t really belong here. You are not
wanted here. You can’t live here. You can’t get a job here.”
Only then comes the religious extremist part: “Clearly, you should
not be living among the infidels.”
What Islamic State
offers them, in a nutshell, is a fast track from zero to hero.
Mix in a gangster
culture and you have a combustible combination. In ghettoized
neighborhoods like Molenbeek todays criminals are tomorrow’s
terrorists, and the radicalization process is in hyperdrive. As a
result, “these guys are not stereotypical Islamists. They gamble,
drink, do drugs. They are lady killers, wear Armani, fashionable
haircuts. And they live off crime,” according to an article
published by Pro Publica. Time and again, it turns out the local
police were aware of suspects like Abdeslam, but only as small-time
thieves. “We knew of several Paris-related suspects before,” a
police officer told me as I sat down with the mayor, “but not for
terrorism reasons, just petty crime and small incidents.”
The mayor quickly
chimed in, determined to be clear I understood there was no way to
know these crooks had suddenly become terrorists, adding “there was
no suspicion of radicalization.” But there is one other common
thread that runs through all these cases: “The people who leave
[for Syria and Iraq] today are all attracted to violence,”
Schepmans said. Dutch officials echo this sentiment, noting in a
recent study that “everyone who has travelled since 2014 to the
area under [the Islamic State’s] control will have seen the
propaganda images of atrocities against ‘non-believers’.” They
know what they are getting into.
And while there is a
component of religious extremism, Belgian officials stress, it is
only skin deep. The suspects appear to be mainly criminals who are
attracted to something that gives them identity and a sense of
empowerment. They are radicalized to the idea of the Islamic state
far more than to Islam. “Salafism [a radical Islamist ideology is
mainstream in Belgium,” was a refrain I heard from several of the
officials I met. “Not all Salafists are terrorists,” they
stressed, “but all our terrorists were targeted for recruitment by
Salafists in these neighborhood extremist networks.”
When I met with the
mayor of Molenbeek, she was equally blunt in describing the area as a
victim of lack of government attention and investment. There is also
confusion at the government level about how to handle the problem.
Municipal authorities stressed that actual counterterrorism is the
job of the Federal Police, who maintain a consolidated list of some
670 terrorist suspects, including people who have gone to fight in
Syria and Iraq (and, more recently, Libya), returning foreign
fighters, and individuals who seem inclined to become foreign
terrorist fighters. A separate federal list focuses on priority
criminal cases (due to the increasingly common links between the two,
authorities plan to merge the two lists). According to local
officials, the municipality has documented at least 85 cases of
people who have been radicalized to terrorism, some of whom have left
to join the Islamic State in Syria and others who have returned.
According to EUROPOL, the European Union police organization, 5,000
terrorist suspects radicalized in Europe have travelled to Syria and
Iraq, some of whom have since returned to Europe.
Following the
Brussels bombings, authorities are laser-focused not only on finding
all the perpetrators and their accomplices, but mapping out the
network of Islamic State terrorists on the ground in Belgium. That
will be no small task, but even that kind of counterterrorism success
will only go so far towards reestablishing a sense of security in
Belgium in particular and Europe more generally. Hardening targets,
implementing greater border security measures, and enhancing
intelligence collection and information sharing are critical and
still subpar, but these tools will only help us contend with
yesterday’s threat; they won’t help us get ahead of tomorrow’s.
The good news is
that Belgian authorities have now realized the need to build a
prevention program. And to be fair, that realization came not last
week but 15 months ago, when Belgian authoritie raided a residence in
Verviers a week after the Charlie Hebdo attack. The raids thwarted
“major terrorist attacks” in Belgium and led to the
intensification of “Plan R”—the government’s national
counter-radicalization plan. The plan predated the Verviers raid, on
paper, but it has now led to tangible changes. A Coordination Unit
for Threat Analysis (CUTA) serves as a fusion center between federal
level national security agencies and local police departments. Nearly
18,000 police officers have been trained to spot potential
radicalization identifiers under the Community Policing to Prevent
Radicalization (COPRA) initiative. And the Federal Police have
instituted a “grasping approach” to radicalization cases in which
police are instructed to “follow up and don’t let go” until
there is no longer any threat the person in question is being
radicalized to violence.
In the months before
the Brussels bombings, local officials also developed “Plan
Molenbeek” to address what they described to me as “the need for
proper institutions to address the unique issues facing the
municipality.” They remain desperately understaffed, but they have
already trained 700 community field workers (including teachers and
social workers) to spot signs of radicalization and partner with
prevention officers to develop a customized intervention for each
case. They meet with counterparts in other municipalities facing
similar issues to share lessons learned. This is especially
important, one official told me, since “we are all learning by
doing.”
Still, since the
November Paris attacks, tracking cases of people on the road to
radicalization has only gotten harder. “Paris was a game-changer,”
a local police officer in Molenbeek told me. “Since then it’s
been like a tsunami of information flowing in from all our partners,
including concerned members of the community, federal agencies, and
our own civilian prevention officers.” Those prevention officers
play a critical role as civilian employees of the municipality
focused solely on integrating people into society, but they are
severely understaffed. The local police also have a
counter-radicalization cell, but they too lack resources. Even with a
staffing boost after the November Paris attacks, the cell numbers
only eight officers. “Most of the people we come across around
youngsters, unemployed, and often involved in criminal activities,”
prevention officers told me. “We try to integrate people we see
into society, that’s the most important thing now, ideally.” A
police officer chimed in, “And we prosecute, as necessary.”
Last week, as
Belgian and French police officers prepared to raid a suspected
Islamic State safe-house, I was sitting with a senior Belgian
counterterrorism official at his downtown headquarters. As we
discussed the Islamic State threat to Europe in general, and Belgium
in particular—about five miles from the site of the raid, but a
world apart—the disconnect between the scale of the threat and the
preparedness of the response became starkly clear. The manhunt for
Abdeslam focused the attention of Belgian counterterrorism officials.
Another terrorist was killed in a shootout at the raid that day, an
Algerian whose body was found next to a rifle, ammunition, a book on
Salafism, and an Islamic State flag.
But police found
clues pointing to Abdeslam, including his fingerprints. Three days
later, police finally captured Abdeslam, who was being sheltered by
family members in Molenbeek, the Brussels municipality where he grew
up, not far from the family home. “We got him,” an official
excitedly tweeted.
In truth the job has
just begun. But after meeting with officials in Molenbeek, I allowed
myself to feel just a touch of optimism: the police and prevention
officers I met in Molenbeek were among the most impressive I’ve met
anywhere. “We are discovering on a daily basis new ways to work in
the prevention space,” one of them commented as our meeting came to
a close. The problem:
Matthew Levitt is
the Fromer-Wexler Fellow and Director of the Stein Program on
Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute for
Near East Policy. He is the author of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint
of Lebanon’s Party of God.
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