BRUSSELS, Belgium — Paris may have been the latest target, but Islamic terrorists trying to elude European authorities by jumping over the continent’s porous borders have learned that this tiny country is a safe place to land.
The Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek in particular has become known as a hotbed of Islamist extremism and hatred after French and Belgian authorities announced over the weekend that the mastermind of the recent violence in Paris as well as two of its other perpetrators lived there.
“We don’t have control of the situation in Molenbeek at present,” Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon admitted during a television news interview on Sunday.
Since the deadly Paris attacks, Belgian authorities have scrambled to keep pace, conducting multiple raids and announcing Tuesday plans to deploy up to 300 extra soldiers to the country’s biggest cities. The government said the move would bring the total number of troops in the streets to 520.
Police are particularly concerned about public safety at large gatherings like sports events, concerts or rallies, The Associated Press reported.
Experts say Belgium’s attraction for terrorist plotters springs from a number of sources: fractured police networks in a country divided along French and Flemish linguistic lines; the special political status of Brussels as the capital of Belgium and the home of the European Union; and an especially dense concentration of alienated Muslims residing in Molenbeek.
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“France has an important Muslim population that is spread out geographically,” said Farid el Asri, director of the EMRID network, a Belgium-based Muslim research group. “In Belgium, a big part is concentrated in Brussels and, more specifically, in historically popular neighborhoods. Particularly in the commune of Molenbeek, there this is a concentration of radical voices.”
Muslims constitute around 6 percent of the Belgian population, but 40 percent of Molenbeek’s approximately 100,000 residents are Muslim. The district houses 22 mosques.
Belgian police raided the neighborhood on Monday in search of Salah Abdeslam, a brother of one of the terrorists who was killed amid the attacks on Paris this weekend. He’s now a fugitive. But they arrested Mohammed Amri, 27, and Hamza Attou, 21, on charges of supplying the Paris terrorists with ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer used in making bombs.
Authorities have also deployed hundreds of troops to the neighborhood and other parts of the country to provide additional security.
Grim precedents
It wasn’t the first time Molenbeek garnered attention for producing terrorists.
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The terrorist who killed four hostages in a Jewish grocery story in Paris in January during an attack that included a deadly raid on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is believed to have purchased his weapons in Molenbeek. Officials also believe the shooter who killed four people in the Brussels Jewish Museum in May purchased his gun in the neighborhood.
Some Belgians have complained that the attention was unfair, but have been shaken again by the Paris events. Loredana Marchi, director of Foyer, a group that seeks to help immigrants integrate into Belgian society, said she was crestfallen when she saw the police raids on the news.
“It can’t be Molenbeek again,” she recalled thinking. “Everywhere in Europe, people were referring to Molenbeek as ’the capital of jihadism.’ This has been so stigmatizing.”
But Belgium has sent the most jihadis to Syria per capita in Europe. More than 400 people from its population of around 11 million have journeyed to fight in the country’s civil war.
“It’s complicated to define someone as radicalized,” said Nadia Fadil, an anthropologist who specialized in Belgian Muslim communities at the Catholic University of Leuven. “There is one criteria we can talk about objectively: how many go to Syria.”
When they return, Belgian authorities often fail to monitor them well. The Brussels capital region, for example, has six separate police agencies. Outside Brussels, government offices in the French and Dutch-speaking regions don’t necessarily communicate well.
“The approach is too divided between different local authorities here in Brussels,” said Mr. Jambon during an event organized by Politico Europe three days before the Paris attacks.
As in France, Muslims in Belgium also suffer from unemployment and lack of employment stemming from discrimination and alienation from Belgian society, where natives often don’t view citizens of North African or Middle Eastern descent as their full-fledged countrymen.
“It creates mistrust towards society. All of this creates frustrations and all the ingredients of a civilization clash,” said Mr. el Asri. “Young people do not expect anything from their present and certainly not from their future. They are also looking for adventure and adrenaline.”
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