The speed, audacious target selection and deadly impact of Tuesday’s terrorist response in Brussels to setbacks inflicted by security services confirm the worst fears of governments and analysts. The attacks show that the constant threat posed by ISIL is as grave in the West as it is in the Middle East.
After last Friday’s arrest of Salah Abdelsam – on the run since playing an important logistical role in last November’s attacks in Paris – French and Belgian officials had stressed that heightened vigilance remained essential.
That message was underlined by French president Francois Hollande’s admission that the network involved in the Paris atrocities was bigger than originally suspected.
The Belgian government said evidence pointed to the existence of one or more active terrorist cells in the Brussels area. The bloody events of Tuesday saw those words come true.
"The new attacks are shocking, but inevitable," Hanif Qadir, a British expert on terrorism and programmes to deradicalise indoctrinated Muslims, told The National. "We cannot just arrest our way out of this problem when there is obviously sufficient support for terrorists to plan further attacks."
"Europe must be braced for more of the same while at the same time seeking the most effective response, which must include obtaining the help, support and – most important – the trust of the [Muslim] community," said Mr Qadir, whose book, Preventing Extremism and Terrorist Recruitment, is due to be published next month.
Abdeslam was detained at a house apparently made available by a friend, just 700 metres from his family’s home in the Molenbeek district of the Belgian capital. His brother Brahim blew himself up during the Paris attacks. The friend whose house Abdesalam was staying in had also been radicalised, according to Belgian media.
Police had concluded Abdeslam was one of two men who escaped when they raided an apartment in the Brussels municipality of Forest three days earlier, killing one suspect in a resulting gun battle.
The arsenal seized in Forest persuaded the authorities that Abdeslam, far from acting on relatives’ appeals to give himself up, was planning further violence. “He was ready to restart something,” said Belgian foreign minister Didier Reynders after the raid.
Ten people, eight in Belgium and two in France, have been detained in relation to the Paris attacks and at least two others are still actively sought.
According to chief Paris prosecutor Francois Molins, Abdeslam has said under questioning that his intention on November 13 was to blow himself up at the Stade de France, one of the targets that night, but that he pulled out at the last minute.
France is now seeking Abdeslam’s extradition to face justice in the city where he allegedly helped organise the attacks that left 130 dead. Legal opinion agrees that although Abdelsam’s opposition to extradition could delay the process, it is inevitable within weeks or months.
Whatever his fate, Tuesday’s bombings at the Zaventum airport and the Maalbeck metro station serving European Union buildings brought swift confirmation of ISIL’s ability to attack even the most obvious of potential targets.
Passengers may have felt entitled to assume the strictest possible security at both locations. But terrorism experts point out that the toughest precautions cannot protect entirely against extremists willing – as in the case of the Brussels airport attack – to kill themselves while inflicting multiple casualties.
Even as the French and Belgian media trumpeted Abdelsam’s arrest as a victory in the war against terrorism, there was some concern that it did not actually make the streets safer. As security was intensified yesterday, with more personnel guarding sensitive locations in several European countries, specialists said the latest attacks were a predictable if devastating response to counter-terrorism successes.
The BBC’s security specialist Frank Gardner, himself a victim of terrorism who suffered partial paralysis after being shot six times by Al Qaeda sympathisers in Riyadh in 2004, identified two flaws specific to Belgium.
He said the country’s intelligence services had a poor system of information-sharing with other authorities, while there was also a lower likelihood of Muslim communities in Belgium alerting police to suspicious behaviour than, for example, Muslim communities in Britain.
Belgium, with a population of 11 million, has Europe’s largest per capita number of citizens fighting with ISIL and other groups, in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. Last year, Pieter Van Ostaeyen, a Belgian historian and commentator on extremism, estimated that the figure had reached just over 500, or one in about 1,300 of the country’s Muslim population.
The nine terrorists who died in the Paris attacks were acclaimed by ISIL. However, formal membership is not necessary in an atmosphere where individuals and groups may also use ISIL rhetoric as an inspiration.
No one visiting Molenbeek – once a mixed area just a short metro journey from the city centre but now overwhelmingly populated by those of Maghrebin origin – fails to notice signs of disenchantment with society of many residents, especially the young.
"Some talk openly in the street of going to do jihad," one Algerian, describing himself as "ashamed" of what the district has become, told the French Aujourd'hui en France newspaper at the weekend.
Muslims in Molenbeek, where several of the Paris attackers grew up, will be concerned at the prospect of a backlash that stigmatises the innocent. This would further damage hopes of securing the community’s trust though ISIL and similar groups welcome increased community tensions that allow them to present themselves as defenders.
Amid the Belgian authorities’ reaction to the bombings, the people of Molenbeek, Schaerbeek and other immigrant-dominated areas of the capital can expect renewed disruption to daily life as properties are searched and potential suspects hunted.
But the sense of resignation felt by some security specialists is shared more widely. Describing the mood on the streets of the capital, Beatrice Delvaux, chief comment writer at Belgium's Le Soir newspaper, wrote: "People stop and look, dazed and empty-eyed. They know it's all true; they also know that they knew it was going to happen, it was bound to happen."
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
