tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/molenbeek-26041/articlesMolenbeek – The Conversation2016-03-23T12:54:34Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/566982016-03-23T12:54:34Z2016-03-23T12:54:34ZHow local terrorist cells make a mockery of European security<p>In the aftermath of the explosions at the airport and in the metro station in <a href="https://theconversation.com/brussels-attacks-a-throwback-to-pre-9-11-terrorism-56705">Brussels</a> on the morning of March 22, 2016, the search for the bomb-making factory became increasingly urgent. Someone who knew what they were doing provided the explosives for this attack. </p>
<p>The suicide belts used at Stade de France and elsewhere during the Paris attacks in November were made with the “Mother of Satan”, TATP (<a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/what-tatp-paris-attackers-used-unstable-hydrogen-peroxide-based-explosive-detonations-2184934">triacetone triperoxide</a>). It is very unstable and made from ingredients found in the cosmetics area of most chemists’ shops. It is difficult to detect by the normal procedures developed for nitrate based explosives, such as sniffer dogs. </p>
<p>It was invented in 1895, and reappeared in the 1980s, used by West Bank Palestinian groups. It is easy to detonate but as likely to damage the user as the target, so some expertise is required to amalgamate the ingredients into an explosive. It can deteriorate quite quickly, so a bomb-making factory or factories needs to be within reasonable range of the point of delivery.</p>
<p>The ingredients cost very little to purchase and, as long as purchases are made at a number of different shops, would be unlikely to be noticed by the shopkeepers concerned.</p>
<h2>Self sufficient</h2>
<p>Local cells, whether they are groups owing allegiance to al-Qaeda or to so-called Islamic State can <a href="http://www.fatf-gafi.org/media/fatf/documents/reports/FATF%20Terrorist%20Financing%20Typologies%20Report.pdf">rely on self-funding</a>, which is mostly carried out via local petty criminal activities such as drug dealing and ATM fraud. The bar in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-it-about-molenbeek-the-bit-of-belgium-that-was-a-base-for-paris-terror-attacks-51007">Molenbeek</a> area of Brussels owned by one of the Abdesalam brothers allegedly involved in the Paris attacks in November was suspected by the police of being a place where <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-france-shooting-belgium-bar-idUKKCN0T52RU20151117">drugs were sold</a>. </p>
<p>The beauty of recruiting petty criminals to an organisation such as Islamic State is that they know people who know people who can move or launder money. Money for terrorist activities is moved in the same way as profits for other criminal activities – via suitcases full of cash, small volume, high-value commodities such as drugs and precious stones, and all the pieces of paper such as shares and bonds that can be exchanged. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/paris-attacks-terrifyingly-fatal-layers-of-resources-and-tactics-1.2580749">Hawala</a> banking and money exchange bureaus have been alleged in newspaper reports to have been involved in funding the Paris attacks.</p>
<h2>What happens at borders</h2>
<p>The trouble is, controlling every land border crossing in Europe is more or less impossible because of the sheer volume of traffic. From my own research interviewing border guards in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, I learned that at an external land border, if the police spend longer than 45 seconds checking a vehicle, a queue of more than five kilometres develops. </p>
<p>Businesses will resist such measures, despite the terror threat, because they don’t want to return to a situation where a lorry driving from Spain to Netherlands loses two hours on the French border, two hours at the Belgian border and two hours on the Dutch border.</p>
<p>Controls at internal European borders <a href="http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100303205641/http:/www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/documents/managingourborders/crime-strategy/protecting-border.pdf?view=Binary">are supposed to have been</a> replaced by offender profiling and offence profiling. There should be a mixture of random checks and profiled checks. But for that to happen, there has to be sharing of intelligence between countries. In addition, smuggling has to happen again and again before a pattern becomes noticeable. </p>
<p>Although borders don’t exist for criminals, terrorists and businesses, they still do for police – and there are still conflicts between different countries’ police forces. Nevertheless, the majority of terrorist activities no longer require cross-border activity. They are locally sourced and financed – and this is what makes them more difficult to detect.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/56698/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bill Tupman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Terrorist attacks that are locally sourced and financed are very hard to detect.Bill Tupman, Honorary Research Fellow, University of ExeterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/565752016-03-20T19:52:03Z2016-03-20T19:52:03ZDon’t rush to blame Molenbeek for harbouring Paris attacker<p>After 120 days on the run, Salah Abdeslam, accused of being part of the group that carried out the brutal attacks in Paris in November 2015, has finally been arrested.</p>
<p>He was found in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-it-about-molenbeek-the-bit-of-belgium-that-was-a-base-for-paris-terror-attacks-51007">Molenbeek</a> district of Brussels, where he lived and worked before the attacks. Despite countless police raids in recent months, Abdeslam managed to evade capture in his own neighbourhood.</p>
<p>In November 2015, he is suspected of being part of three well-organised groups of jihadists which attacked Paris, including bars, the Bataclan concert hall and the area around the Stade de France. They killed 130 people and most of the attackers also died.</p>
<p>Islamic State claimed a further attack in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/europe/inquiry-finds-mounting-proof-of-syria-link-to-paris-attacks.html?_r=0">18th Arondissement</a> which didn’t happen. It is not yet clear if this was to be carried out by Abdeslam.</p>
<p>He claims that he was going to blow himself up in the Stade de France, but changed his mind. One final attacker, Mohamed Abrini, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34832512">remains on the run</a>.</p>
<h2>Hiding in plain sight</h2>
<p>Salah Abdeslam’s brother, Brahim, was one of the Paris attackers who blew himself up near a café on Boulevard Voltaire. Acquaintances claim that both drank alcohol and sold drugs, were not known as regular attenders at the mosque, and had a background in <a href="http://www.france24.com/en/20160319-salah-abdeslam-what-we-know">petty crime</a>.</p>
<p>Newspapers and anonymous “officials” have branded Molenbeek with a number of alarmist epithets. It’s a “terror capital”, a “jihadi breeding ground” and so on. It is a district of 100,000 people, with high rates of unemployment, especially among its young, multi-ethnic locals. It is home to a transient population.</p>
<p>Criminologists of the 1930s <a href="http://userpages.umbc.edu/%7Elutters/pubs/1996_SWLNote96-1_Lutters,Ackerman.pdf">Chicago School</a> would recognise Molenbeek immediately. This is a place where community institutions are dislocated, and where the unemployed can choose between drug addiction and a criminal career. The normal choice of rackets – drug dealing, confidence trickstering, prostitution, burglary and violence – have been joined by a new greasy pole: jihadism.</p>
<p>It is not Islam that is the problem in <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-it-about-molenbeek-the-bit-of-belgium-that-was-a-base-for-paris-terror-attacks-51007">Molenbeek</a>, but unemployment and poverty. It is difficult to police because young people move flats all the time and civil society is patchy. There are few genuine community leaders with whom these young people can work when they need support.</p>
<p>In such a district, it is not really surprising that it has taken so long to find Abdeslam. Partners for the police are hard to find. It’s not hard to imagine why his associates would have decided to shelter him rather than report him. </p>
<p>The more important question is how the whole network managed to evade detection before the attack. How much was this down to the sophistication of their methods and how much was it the result of police failures and open borders?</p>
<h2>Highly organised operation</h2>
<p>There was a large network behind the Paris attacks, not just the five-participant cell that was characteristic of terrorism in the 1960s and 70s. The New York Times, which has obtained a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/world/europe/a-view-of-isiss-evolution-in-new-details-of-paris-attacks.html?emc=edit_th_20160320&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=22886576&_r=0">report</a> by the French police, claims 18 people are in custody in six countries suspected of helping the attackers. This is in addition to the nine who are already dead.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115706/original/image-20160320-4415-1h440jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115706/original/image-20160320-4415-1h440jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115706/original/image-20160320-4415-1h440jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115706/original/image-20160320-4415-1h440jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115706/original/image-20160320-4415-1h440jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115706/original/image-20160320-4415-1h440jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115706/original/image-20160320-4415-1h440jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Police in Molenbeek.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Laurent Dubrule</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They were well trained and able to carry out a co-ordinated attack in a number of different places, using both explosives and firearms, taking hostages and effectively confusing and hampering the police response. In the months leading up to the attack, they were able to slip in and out of Europe undetected, crossing both internal and external borders.</p>
<p>No email traces or evidence of online chats have been discovered. The attackers used phones once, then discarded them. In the Bataclan, they used hostages’ phones. They had clearly learnt from police investigations into previous attacks, again suggesting training and discipline.</p>
<p>According to the New York Times, a woman held hostage in the Bataclan saw one of the terrorists switch on a laptop, and that what appeared on the screen looked like gibberish – potentially meaning he was using encryption software.</p>
<p>There are legal and cultural problems with sharing information between security services, both within countries and across borders. There are problems transliterating Arabic names in different systems. There are problems sorting the wheat from the chaff in the intelligence.</p>
<p>It is always possible to recognise relevant intelligence with hindsight, but there are not enough resources to put all suspects under surveillance. It is also probable that individuals with petty criminal backgrounds have not been considered as dangerous as those with hardline ideological commitments.</p>
<h2>Consequences for Europeans</h2>
<p>The French prosecutor appears suspicious of the testimony Abdeslam has initially given to the Belgian police, given that he appears to have driven some of the attackers to the Stade de France.</p>
<p>It may be that both he and others were intended to survive and continue plans for further attacks, although events suggest improvisation played a part as well as planning. If so, it will be even more vital to discover how his communication systems operated.</p>
<p>There will be increased border checks, including at Schengen internal borders. There will be increased surveillance. There will be increased demands for access to the phone and email records of all citizens. There will be increased roll-out of CCTV across Europe.</p>
<p>But the lesson to learn from all this is that terrorists, just like criminals, change their modus operandi in response to changes by the security forces. The rest of us get inconvenienced, not the terrorists. The need is to keep the public onside – and not to further alienate marginal communities like Molenbeek.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/56575/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bill Tupman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Belgian police have done little to win hearts and minds in this neighbourhood.Bill Tupman, Honorary Research Fellow, University of ExeterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/510072015-11-20T14:28:44Z2015-11-20T14:28:44ZWhat is it about Molenbeek? The bit of Belgium that was a base for Paris terror attacks<p>Just as during the German invasions of 1914 and 1940, war, it seems, is coming to France through Belgium. If one follows the logic of the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/16/paris-attacks-belgian-connection-strain-french-relations">statements</a> of various French political leaders since the bloody attacks in Paris on November 13, Belgium has become the base from which <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/islamic-state">Islamic State</a> has brought the conflicts of the Middle East to the streets of Paris.</p>
<p>There is much about that logic that would not withstand serious analysis. France has <a href="https://theconversation.com/fragile-france-must-avoid-further-division-after-paris-attacks-36176">grown many of its problems</a> within its own suburbs. And groups committed to armed action, from the Resistance movements of World War II to the Basque nationalist groups of the 1980s and 1990s, have often found it expedient to use neighbouring territories as a base from which to launch their operations. </p>
<p>That said, the French authorities have a case. Molenbeek – an urban commune on the north-western edges of Brussels – is unlikely to feature any time soon on tourist-bus tours of historic Brussels.</p>
<p>Though it lies only a couple of kilometres from the Grand Place and the <a href="http://www.brussels.be/artdet.cfm/4328">Manneken Pis</a>, and a mere taxi ride from European Commission president <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/jean-claude-juncker">Jean-Claude Juncker’s</a> office, Molenbeek is another world. This inner-city area, now on the front pages of newspapers across Europe, is deprived of funds, social cohesion and effective government.</p>
<p>Former residents have left for more prosperous suburbs on the outskirts of Brussels. In their place, a fractured community has emerged. Those who carried out the gun attacks in Paris allegedly found convenient anonymity there as well as <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/police-raids-in-molenbeek-highlight-darker-side-of-brussels/article27289883/">access to weaponry</a> and the support of like-minded radicalised Islamic militants.</p>
<p>It was not always so. Molenbeek was, only 20 years ago, a Socialist bastion of working-class Brussels. It is francophone for the most part, but composed predominantly of people who, a couple of generations earlier, had arrived as Dutch-speaking migrants from Flanders.</p>
<p>Times, however, have changed. Its former football team, FC Brussels, has slipped into the third division – and, in the last communal elections, the Socialists, who controlled the commune for decades under the leadership of leading Brussels political figure Philippe Moureaux, finally lost control amid a multitude of accusations of <a href="http://www.rtl.be/info/belgique/politique/philippe-moureaux-accuse-de-laxisme-a-molenbeek-botte-en-touche-j-avais-plus-d-infos-car-j-etais-proche-de-ma-population--771125.aspx">institutionalised corruption</a>.</p>
<p>The present mayor, <a href="http://www.dhnet.be/actu/belgique/francoise-schepmans-on-a-trop-longtemps-vecu-dans-le-deni-5647ae073570bccfaf092a49">Françoise Schepmans</a>, is an implausibly middle-class Liberal, who presides over a commune which is indisputably broke, but also broken.</p>
<p>The combined impact of urban decline, social exodus and the remorseless development of Brussels as a city that exists to service a rootless international elite has found its mirror in the transformation of Molenbeek into a commune composed in large part of short-term migrant workers, drawn from a vast array of cultural backgrounds, united only by their limited engagement with somewhere called Belgium.</p>
<p>All of this is a step beyond what Europeans have become accustomed to think of as multiculturalism. Brussels has long been a multicultural city, and especially so since the arrival of substantial communities of North African, Turkish and Central African migrants in the 1960s and 1970s. But Molenbeek, in common with some of the other inner-city districts of Brussels, has become a micro-world of multiple communities within which people construct their own sense of identity.</p>
<h2>A world away from Brussels</h2>
<p>Much of this is the product of the contemporary tides of globalisation. What is true of Molenbeek would be equally true of areas of London and Paris. But what is specifically Belgian about this story is the <a href="http://www.journalbelgianhistory.be/en/system/files/article_pdf/BTNG-RBHC,%2035,%202005,%204,%20pp%20573-596.pdf">state</a> of Belgium.</p>
<p>Belgium has many virtues as a political community. It has provided a model of how the decline of national loyalties need not be accompanied by mass mobilisation and political violence. But the radical devolution of central power that has occurred since the 1980s has emptied the Belgian federal institutions of much of their former power. Their responsibilities have gradually been devolved to a complex structure of regions and linguistic communities.</p>
<p>That is a contemporary story of the decline of centralising nationalism. But, as current events have served to reveal, that has also resulted in the erosion of public institutions.</p>
<p>Molenbeek lacks not only resources but also the support provided by an effective state authority. As one of 19 largely independent communes of the city of Brussels, its public officials, who are confronted by all of the problems of an inner-city suburb, lack the ability to provide effective schooling, social services or the public structures which might generate the ties of community. The consequence is a world where the more conventional role of the state has been supplanted by other less formal sources of provision, support and community.</p>
<p>It also, as we have discovered, lacks much by way of an effective police. That is not unique to Molenbeek. Ever since the horrific child kidnappings committed by <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3794985.stm">Marc Dutroux</a> and his accomplices in the 1990s, the manifold shortcomings of the Belgian police have hardly been a secret. Too much localism, too many overlapping authorities and too much politicisation of nominations have all diminished the capacity of Belgium’s multiple police forces to rise to more than the most mundane challenges.</p>
<p>This, as the events of the past few days have demonstrated, has left Molenbeek vulnerable to gangsterism and opportunistic terrorism. To fix such problems, Belgium, it seems, might have to reinvent itself as a state.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/51007/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Conway does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The sad history of Belgium has left fertile ground for terrorism in this struggling neighbourhood.Martin Conway, Professor of Contemporary European History, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.