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Two days after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, a 31-year-old called Nizar Trabelsi was detained in Uccle , on the outskirts of Brussels. The former footballer of Tunisian origin was eventually sentenced to 10 years in prison for an intended attack on a Nato base. In 2003, another militant of Tunisian origin detained in Belgium was sentenced to six years in prison for his role in a Brussels-based network which supplied fraudulent documents that had allowed the killers of an Afghan commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud , who fell victim to a suicide bomber two days before 9/11, to reach their target.
In the first half of the last decade, as European security services struggled to understand the new threat they faced, and bombs exploded in Madrid and London, Belgium was largely ignored. Given the increasingly evident role that the country has played in the Paris attacks, this now looks like a mistake. By some estimates, Belgium has supplied the highest per capita number of fighters to Syria of any European nation – between 350 and 550, out of a total population of 11 million that includes fewer than half a million Muslims.
This is a problem that has been building for many years. As elsewhere in Europe, Belgium suffered waves of terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s linked to unrest in the Middle East. “There is a very long history of connection between Belgium and France in the realm of terrorism,” said Rik Coolsaet , an expert in terrorism at the University of Ghent. In the first half of the last decade, a few score men from Belgium made their way to Iraq. So too did Muriel Degauque , a convert from Charleroi, who died in 2005 while bombing a US convoy in Iraq, becoming the first European woman to launch a suicide attack.
Others travelled to Afghanistan. In 2008, a network sending young Belgian Muslims to al-Qaida training camps was broken up. Many appeared disappointed by what they found in the combat zone but that did not seem to slow the flow. Several returned with the intention of committing attacks at home, prosecutors claimed. The leader of the group was Moez Garsallaoui , a Tunisian-born Belgian based on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. Garsallaoui was not part of al-Qaida, but formed his own faction, fighting international forces in Afghanistan and fomenting terror back in Europe. Before being killed by a US drone strike in 2012, he trained Mohammed Merah , the 23-year-old French former petty criminal who killed seven people in Toulouse and Montauban.
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With French jets pounding the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa, US planes targeting its oil tankers and Kurdish forces splitting a supply line from Mosul to Raqqa, the past three days have been among the most difficult that the terror group has faced in its self-declared caliphate. As the dust settles, Isis’s hold on its original territory and revenues is, perhaps for the first time, showing signs of slipping. The group has lost control of the highway linking the two main hubs of its heartland. And the parallel oil trade, which had generated as much as $40m (£26m) a month even while refineries were being bombed, is now in jeopardy.
The Raqqa strikes, 20 in total, targeted parts of the city that had not been hit before, including a sports stadium, a museum, an equestrian centre and several administration buildings. Residents questioned the usefulness of the strikes, suggesting they had no military purpose – a claim countered by French officials who said planners of the Paris attacks on Friday had given final instructions to the suicide bombers from within Raqqa, and that training camps were a primary target.
Further east, near Syria’s border with Iraq, there were repeated US strikes on oil tankers that transport crude from makeshift refineries. Oil production sites have been hit before, but not the tankers until now. US officials said 116 tankers were destroyed on Sunday, hobbling a distribution system that, along with taxation, accounts for much of Isis’s revenues. The US military said it had dropped leaflets near tankers queuing near a collection site, warning them of an imminent attack. An estimated 300 trucks were in the area at the time. Officials said they had not targeted the trucks before now, fearing civilian casualties. There were no reports on whether drivers had been killed.
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The tiny nation renowned for beer, chocolates and the comic book hero Tintin is now suddenly infamous for Islamic extremism - and the easy availability of illegal weapons. Belgium has a central location in Europe; few border controls; a common language with prime jihadi target France; and a political divide between French and Dutch speakers that has long created bureaucratic disarray in justice and security. From the prime minister down, there is widespread acknowledgment of a complicated and disjointed national structure that hampers the fight against extremism. "We have to do more and we have to do better," Prime Minister Charles Michel told legislators on Thursday, as he announced a slew of fresh measures to fight Islamic extremism.
For years, there have been calls for more funds to boost the ranks of judges and police, but progress has been slow as rival political camps bickered and austerity measures set in. Meanwhile, the splintering of municipal authority in Brussels and judicial authority nationwide means there's little sense of who's in charge of what in security matters. Add to that a system in which policemen are often blocked from crossing borders - lacking jurisdiction to work in neighboring countries - while criminals can take advantage of Europe's open border policy, and it becomes clear why Belgium is attractive for terrorists. "They do shop around for locations where it's easier to be unnoticed, or that your opponents will lose your trail," said Edwin Bakker, director of the Centre for Terrorism and Counterterrorism at Leiden University.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian who was the presumed organizer of the attacks, was killed in a raid Wednesday outside of Paris. Belgium and France are still on a manhunt for Frenchman Salah Abdeslam, a longtime Brussels resident. Both men grew up in the hardscrabble Molenbeek district, and their family homes stand within a short walk of its main police station. Abdeslam's brother, Brahim, blew himself up in a suicide attack, while another Brussels resident, Bilal Hafdi, also died in a suicide bombing. On Saturday authorities raised the threat alert for the Belgian capital to the highest level, citing "quite precise information about the risk of an attack like the one that happened in Paris." Heavily armed police and soldiers patrolled key intersections, subways were closed and many stores shut their doors as citizens were encouraged to avoid areas where large numbers of people gather.
Perched over Brussels stands the massive Palace of Justice, once a shining monument to democratic values, now cloaked for decades in scaffolding so decrepit it has come to symbolize Belgium's neglect for law and order. From there, one can look out onto the Midi, a grimy neighborhood that has become a treasure trove for any criminal looking for illegal arms. Until 2006, Belgium had a very permissive gun law by European standards, and many weapons used in the 1990s Balkan wars easily found their way into the Belgian criminal underworld. At the same time, the Justice Ministry was hurt by austerity measures, rendering it powerless to dig into the root causes of the problem.
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SUSPECTED MASTERMIND
-ABDELHAMID ABAAOUD, 28
French investigators identified Belgian-born Abaaoud of Moroccan descent as the architect of the Paris attacks. A U.S. official briefed on intelligence matters said Abaaoud was a key figure in an Islamic State external operations cell that U.S. intelligence agencies have been tracking for months. Officials initially believed he had coordinated the assaults against a soccer stadium, cafes and a rock concert from Syria, but he died during a police raid Wednesday on a Paris apartment that was a 15-minute walk from the Stade de France.
Abaaoud was also suspected of involvement in several thwarted attacks this year, including on a church in the Parisian suburb of Villejuif, and possibly an attempted attack on a high-speed train when three Americans tackled a heavily armed man. Abaaoud is believed to have gotten to know some of the attackers responsible for the Paris massacre in the Moleenbeek neighborhood of Brussels where he grew up.
How and when Abaaoud entered France before his death remained unclear. He had bragged in the Islamic State group's English-language magazine that he was able to slip in and out of Europe undetected. Abaaoud was wanted in Belgium, where he was sentenced in absentia this year to 20 years' imprisonment for serving as an IS recruiter and kidnapping his younger brother, Younes. Belgian authorities say Abaaoud brought the boy, then 13, to Syria last year to join him in IS-controlled territory.
BATACLAN KILLERS
MUSLIM W/KNIVES, DRIVES CAR INTO CROWD IN ANTWERP
March 23, 2017
Daniel Greenfield
UPDATE: His name is Mohammed R. And the weapon appears to be a riot gun.
That ever so tiny minority of violent extremists certainly seems to be highly active.
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It's wonderful how they manage to tell you every detail, particularly the irrelevant ones like his age, while leaving out the relevant motivation detail.
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It's the fault of those vehicles. They are becoming radicalized.
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French vs. French-Tunisian. What a difference one word makes.
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Nothing to do with Islam. Let's pray for Antwerp. Then get back to protesting common sense migration reform.
#PrayforSanity
Muslim w/Knives, Drives Car into Crowd in Antwerp
Belgium: Muslim rallygoers call for slaughter of Jews
It is going to spread across all of Europe and someone, somewhere has got to stand up to it.
Read more @ Belgium: Muslim rallygoers call for ?slaughter of Jews? : Jihad Watch
I've been trying to get management here at USMB to add a MORON button, for jackasses like you..Belgium: Muslim rallygoers call for slaughter of Jews
It is going to spread across all of Europe and someone, somewhere has got to stand up to it.
Read more @ Belgium: Muslim rallygoers call for ?slaughter of Jews? : Jihad Watch
Well, the same stuff happens among southern hicks too.
Remember the 1930s? Didn't take Muslims, did it?
Those people are beasts, the only way you can humanize them is to cut off their heads and let them roll west...
