Mechelen, Belgium: Within weeks of setting up a Facebook account and posing as a would-be Belgian Islamist militant, Pieter Van Ostaeyen amassed more than 1,000 “friends.”
The 38-year-old Arabic speaker and student of medieval Middle East history set out three years ago to understand what drives hundreds of young Europeans into the arms of Muslim extremists. Van Ostaeyen says his insights are being used by Belgian intelligence services investigating such movements after anti-terrorist raids a month ago left two suspected militants dead just days after Islamist attacks in Paris.
“I follow a lot of foreign fighters and they all follow me back,” Van Ostaeyen said of his activity on Twitter. Even after he stopped concealing his identity, messages continued to pour into his inbox, from impoverished city neighbourhoods home to North African immigrants, to the war zones of Syria and Iraq.
Attacks in Copenhagen on Saturday that left two dead, assaults in Paris in January that claimed 17 lives and the raids in Belgium have added greater urgency to efforts to get to the root of Europe’s home-grown Islamist terrorism.
“Intelligence services in Europe are already doing a lot, nearly one attack per month has been prevented since 2001 and thousands of people arrested in relation to terrorism and still new suspects are discovered every week,” Claude Moniquet, the head of Brussels-based consulting firm European Strategic Intelligence and Security Centre, said in an interview. “There can never be zero risk and we have to get used to the idea there’ll be more attacks even if many are prevented, the question is only where and when.”
Belgium is Europe’s biggest per capita contributor of fighters to Syria, leaving its government and police working on averting attacks and preventing the country’s youth from falling prey to peddlers of radical Islam.
Belgians have joined extremist networks since the emergence of modern militant groups during the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s. Where once dozens left each year, their ranks have swollen to hundreds, with the biggest surge following the outbreak of fighting in Syria four years ago.
Stemming the tide will need a national soul-searching, said Van Ostaeyen.
“I’m not a sociologist or an anthropologist; I don’t know what can be done, but I do believe we need a more inclusive society,” he said in an interview at his home in Mechelen, a town about 40 minutes from Brussels. “We need to live together instead of living in two completely different worlds.”
Countries in Europe with different social models — integrationist in France, multiculturalist in Britain — are exposed to the militancy problem, said Marc Hecker, a research fellow at the Security Studies Centre at the Institut Francais des Relations Internationales in Paris. “So it wouldn’t be right to condemn any particular societal model.”
Between 3,000 and 5,000 European Union citizens have joined militant ranks, according to Europol. Belgium said in October that about 350 of its citizens had left the country for Syria and Iraq.
More than 70 have returned. Last year, a gunmen trained in Syria killed three people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels. The risk the returnees pose was brought into focus again on January 15 when two men suspected of plotting a “major” attack were killed and a dozen others arrested in raids in the town of Verviers in eastern Belgium and the gritty Brussels neighbourhood of Molenbeek.
Molenbeek, known in the early Middle Ages for its miraculous well of Saint Gertrude, which drew thousands of pilgrims, is today a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood with people mainly of Moroccan and Turkish ancestry.
Belgian authorities say the two men killed in the Verviers raids were originally from Molenbeek, among the country’s poorest areas with youth unemployment of 40 per cent.
Prosecutors won’t give details of their counterterrorism operations for security reasons and declined to comment on whether they are using Van Ostaeyen’s findings.
Eric Van Der Sypt, a spokesman for the prosecutors, said police believe some of the suspects rounded up in the January 15 raids had recently returned from Syria. He said the Verviers cell was “planning to commit serious terrorist attacks, and to do so imminently.”
The group’s intended target was the police, he said.
About 180 Belgians were fighting in Syria and Iraq in 2014, while about 100 had returned home, newspaper Le Soir said in January. About 10 Belgians a month join the fight, it estimated.
Many militant recruits are third and fourth generation immigrants living on the margins in Flemish cities like Antwerp and Mechelen, where nationalist parties have held sway for years, Van Ostaeyen said. Right-wing Vlaams Belang has advocated deporting Muslim immigrants who don’t renounce their faith.
The government points to Sharia4Belgium as a key factor in turning Belgium into a militant hub. The Antwerp Criminal Court in a February 11 ruling labelled the group a terrorist organisation and sentenced its leader, Fouad Belkacem, to 12 years in jail.
Several other members of Sharia4Belgium, set up by Belkacem in 2010 and dissolved about two years later, received sentences ranging from 40 months to 15 years. Belkacem’s bodyguard fled to Syria and appears in Daesh propaganda videos.
Prosecutors said Belkacem used street preaching in Antwerp to lure recruits. The court found that Sharia4Belgium “played an active role” in sending people to become fighters in Syria.
Belkacem, serving a prison term for inciting hatred, was building on an old legacy.
A Belgian cell played a key role in the deadly 2004 Madrid train bombings claimed by Al Qaida. In 2005, Muriel Degauque, a Belgian convert became the first female western suicide bomber in Iraq. She had been in touch with Malika Al Aroud, a Belgium woman in jail on terrorism charges, who was one of the country’s most prominent internet militants.
Many militants use Facebook and Twitter freely to recruit and boast. They see social media as a showcase, Hecker said.
“The reality is that they’re convinced of the righteousness of their cause so they have no reason not to communicate about it,” he said. “It gives them a possibility to create a climate of terror.”
Belgium isn’t alone in trying to deal with home-grown fighters. EU governments in January pledged to exchange more intelligence with Arab states and work on counterterrorism projects with countries including Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria and the Gulf states. And EU ministers will meet again next month in Paris to discuss new measures to tackle radicalisation across the continent.
“The internet has become a primary means for radicalisation and recruitment,” EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told a conference on Countering Violent Extremism Thursday in Washington. “In the EU, we will need to enhance security measures to prevent new attacks” by terrorists.
What’s making things hard for intelligence services is that they are increasingly faced with individuals whose actions are disconnected from terrorist groups even as they draw on their ideologies, said Moniquet.
“The atomisation of the movement makes it much more difficult to detect everywhere, whether in Belgium, France, the UK or Denmark,” he said. “Individuals are much more difficult to fight than organisations.”
