The Belgian Connection and Europe’s Counterterrorism Failure

The Belgian Connection and Europe’s Counterterrorism Failure
A candlelight vigil for the victims of the Paris attacks, Molenbeek, Belgium, Nov. 18, 2015 (AP photo by Virginia Mayo).

As French police and detectives tried to make sense of the coordinated attacks that rocked Paris on Friday, eyewitnesses reported to have seen black-clad men emerging from cars with Belgian license plates. That led detectives to search a car with foreign license plates parked near the Bataclan theater, where at least 89 concertgoers were murdered. Upon searching the car, they found a discarded parking ticket, issued in Molenbeek, an impoverished district of Brussels.

That, as part of a larger investigation, led French authorities to identify the alleged organizer of the Paris attacks: Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 27-year-old Belgian who had fought in Syria with the self-proclaimed Islamic State and was already on Belgian authorities’ radar as a suspect in a terrorist plot that was thwarted in January. Friday’s massacre, French President Francois Hollande said, was “planned in Syria, organized in Belgium, perpetrated on our soil with French complicity.”

This is not the first time that Belgium has made news as a source of radicals. In recent years, it has become Europe’s largest per capita exporter of fighters to Syria and Iraq: Official figures indicate that more than 350 Belgians—unofficial research points to more than 500—have gone to Syria from a country of 11 million.

Keep reading for free!

Get instant access to the rest of this article by submitting your email address below. You'll also get access to three articles of your choice each month and our free newsletter:

Or, Subscribe now to get full access.

Already a subscriber? Log in here .

What you’ll get with an All-Access subscription to World Politics Review:

A WPR subscription is like no other resource — it’s like having a personal curator and expert analyst of global affairs news. Subscribe now, and you’ll get:

  • Immediate and instant access to the full searchable library of tens of thousands of articles.
  • Daily articles with original analysis, written by leading topic experts, delivered to you every weekday.
  • Regular in-depth articles with deep dives into important issues and countries.
  • The Daily Review email, with our take on the day’s most important news, the latest WPR analysis, what’s on our radar, and more.
  • The Weekly Review email, with quick summaries of the week’s most important coverage, and what’s to come.
  • Completely ad-free reading.

And all of this is available to you when you subscribe today.

More World Politics Review