A Preventable Atrocity in Brussels
Why were the jihadist killers not stopped in time?
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/262280/preventable-atrocity-brussels-joseph-kleinMarch 25, 2016
Joseph Klein
The suicide bombings at the Brussels airport and a train station on March 22nd resulted in at least 31 deaths and approximately 300 wounded. ISIS took responsibility for the slaughter of innocent civilians, which had all the hallmarks of the carefully planned and coordinated multi-pronged Paris attacks it launched last November. The Brussels attacks occurred a few days after the arrest last week of Salah Abdeslam, who was involved in the Paris massacres and was in the midst of planning more attacks in his home country of Belgium. Abdeslam was a master recruiter for ISIS, tapping associates from his childhood home in the jihadist neighborhood of Brussels known as Molenbeek, where planning for the Paris attacks had been carried out.
"Not only did he drop out of sight, but he did so to organize another attack, with accomplices everywhere,” said French Senator Nathalie Goulet, co-head of a commission tracking jihadi networks, as quoted by the Associated Press.
The Brussels operation was already well along in the planning phase before Abdeslam’s arrest. However, his accomplices evidently accelerated the timetable after his arrest.They wanted to make sure that attacks resulting in a large number of civilian casualties were successfully carried out before the Belgian authorities could act on any information they were gleaning from Abdeslam.
Two of the bombers who blew themselves up with sophisticated explosives designed to inflict significant death and destruction were Belgian-born brothers. They were Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui, aged 29 and 27 respectively. A third suicide bomber was 24-year-old Moroccan-born Najim Laachraoui. Another unidentified man escaped without setting off his bomb and is being hunted by Belgian authorities. It has been reported that authorities suspect other accomplices may have been involved, who are still at lodge.
The Bakraoui brothers, who reportedly had links with Abdeslam, were ex-cons before they found their calling with ISIS. Khalid had received a five year prison sentence in 2011 for armed robbery and car theft. His older brother Ibrahim had been sentenced to nine years in prison for opening fire on policemen during a 2010 burglary. He was released early, reportedly for good behavior. Ibrahim “repaid” the Belgian judicial system’s leniency by detonating his bomb at the Brussels airport. Khalid exploded his at a train station near the European Union headquarters.
According to Turkish officials, Ibrahim had been detained last June at a border crossing with Syria and deported to the Netherlands. Although Turkey had informed Dutch and Belgian authorities that Ibrahim was connected with ISIS, he was released by the Netherlands because, according to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “Belgium could not establish any links with terrorism.”
On March 15th, a team of Belgian and French police investigating the Paris massacres located a safe house apartment rented by the younger brother, Khalid Bakraoui, under a false name. Khalid had also been suspected of renting other hideouts, including one in a southern Belgian city from which Abdeslam had reportedly set out to Paris to help lead the attacks there last November.
Thus, both brothers should have been on the police’s radar as jihadist suspects with a criminal past. But they were not caught in time.
After Abdeslam’s arrest, the Bakraoui brothers must have had the sense that the police were closing in on them. Police found a message from Ibrahim on an abandoned computer, which revealed his fear of being apprehended: "Hunted everywhere... no longer safe. I don't know what to do." The common criminal thug-turned-jihadist took the coward’s way out and killed innocent civilians along the way.
Najim Laachraoui was the third suicide bomber, who, like Ibrahim, was killed when he detonated his suitcase bomb at the Brussels airport. Laachraoui was a far more important asset to ISIS than the Bakraoui brothers. He was the master bomb maker responsible for producing the bombs used in both the Paris and Brussels attacks, according to sources cited by Fox News. While the Bakraoui brothers were expendable, Laachraoui’s death may not have been expected by his ISIS handlers and may create a temporary kink in their plans. Bomb makers handling volatile chemicals like those used in the Paris and Brussels attacks take time to train properly.
Laachraoui was raised in the predominantly Muslim Schaerbeek neighborhood, the Washington Post reported, but attended a Catholic high school. He had a background in electro-mechanical engineering. He made his way to Syria in February 2013. Laachraoui managed to return to Europe where he practiced his bomb-making craft. Laachraoui made the bombs used in Paris as well as Brussels. He also recruited and trained other killers to join ISIS’s bloody jihad.
The only silver lining in the tragic Brussel attacks, if there can be one at all, was that the ISIS jihadists may have had something potentially far worse in mind. They reportedly were planning originally to attack a nuclear power plant, which could have led to the loss of potentially thousands of lives if the jihadists had gotten their hands on radioactive material.
Sadly, however, the carnage that did take place in Brussels on Tuesday was preventable. There were security flaws within Belgium and at the European Union level. As a result, the jihadists were able to hide in plain sight in their own neighborhoods. They were also able to move about at will from country to country within Europe, and to the Middle East and back. They were able to rent safe houses and cars, accumulate vast stocks of chemicals and nails for their deadly bombs, and implement their attacks under the noses of the Belgian police.
Within Belgium, local government officials work at cross purposes with the federal authorities, rather than share information and work together to monitor and detain suspects. Rivalries between local and federal agencies, as well as among federal agencies themselves, prevent the timely sharing of intelligence information that could save lives. Belgium makes the pre-9/11 barriers between the FBI and intelligence services benign by comparison.
Even before the Paris attacks, the mayor of the Molenbeek, the jihadi-infested Brussels district where the planning for both the Paris and Brussels attacks took place, received a list of nearly 100 suspected jihadists from Belgian security forces. Salah Abdeslam and Najim Laachraoui were on the list. The Molenbeek mayor, Françoise Schepmans, ignored the list when she received it.
In fact, the Molenbeek mayor was downright contemptuous regarding the list, telling an interviewer: “What was I supposed to do about them? It is not my job to track possible terrorists. It is the responsibility of the federal police."
In addition, Belgian law enforcement and security officers have conducted grossly inadequate surveillance of known suspects, who were being protected by friends and family in the Molenbeek and Schaerbeek neighborhoods. The police are afraid to enter these neighborhoods, much less patrol them. Belgium’s intelligence services are very understaffed in proportion to the number of ISIS affiliated or sympathizing jihadists believed to be residing within Belgium. There is a reason why Belgium has been nicknamed ‘Belgistan.’ More people from Belgium on a per capita basis have gone to Syria to join ISIS than from any other European country. Belgium’s resources must be up to the task of tracking them, even if other European Union countries and the United States have to send their own investigative and intelligence experts to help out.
The European Union itself has its own serious problems that need to be dealt with right away. It is inexcusable that both Belgium and Norway ignored Turkey’s warning regarding Ibrahim Bakraoui, a convicted criminal, who was released from custody due to supposed lack of evidence. Turkey’s warning alone should have been sufficient to hold him, especially since Turkey’s previous warnings about foreign jihadists trying to traverse its border with Syria have turned out to be reliable.
The porous borders among EU states work to the benefit of the jihadists, particularly those holding EU member state citizenship. Under EU rules they are free to travel from country to country within the EU with minimal interference. Until recently, many migrants from Syria and other parts of the Middle East and North Africa have also been able to exploit the loose travel restrictions among the EU states.
At the same time, the EU member states themselves are not deriving the benefits of coordination and rapid information sharing that an integrated union should provide. There is no effective centralized EU-wide counter-terrorism agency. Databases are incomplete. And even if they were complete, the EU bureaucracy has a rule prohibiting the use of one database known as the Schengen Information System, which contains criminal suspects’ surveillance records, for spot-checking individuals at the open Schengen borders. Without that insane rule, the bomb maker Laachraoui, who returned to Europe from Syria posing as a Syrian migrant, could have been immediately identified as having a criminal record when he was picked up by police on his way from Hungary to Belgium. He was traveling with Abdeslam, who also had a criminal record. They could have been detained and intensely questioned, rather than let go.
Finally, the EU – and the United States, for that matter – have to forsake political correctness and start using aggressive profiling and interrogation techniques. It is becoming tiresome to hear that not all Muslims are terrorists. Yes that’s true, but the fact is that the vast majority of dangerous terrorists today are self-declared Muslims. In Belgium and other European countries especially, the jihadists tend to be clustered in majority Muslim neighborhoods such as Molenbeek and Schaerbeek. Studies have shown that homegrown jihadists are commonly males, averaging in age in the mid-twenties. Some have had prior criminal records unrelated to jihad. Brothers and other close relatives tend to operate together in the same cells, for reasons of trust and mutual reinforcement.
The Bakraoui brothers fit this profiling to a tee, and both should have already been in one or more criminal suspect databases, assuming they were kept up-to-date. They are now dead. However, Salah Abdeslam is still alive and in custody. Whatever interrogation techniques that were used to extract information from Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the 9/11 mastermind, should be applied to Abdeslam, one of the masterminds of the Paris attacks. He was in the midst of planning more attacks and should be interrogated intensely until his interrogators are satisfied that he has revealed all he knows about possible future operations.
An anti-terror investigator with knowledge of both Belgium and France was quoted by The Daily Mail as saying: “There is no doubt that chances were missed to stop many of these men and, in time, the authorities will have to address this but for now they will be wondering how many more have slipped through the net and are planning their own attacks.”
The authorities better get their act together very quickly, as time is of the essence. ISIS has reportedly sent 400 or more trained jihadists to Europe to conduct more waves of terror, the Associated Press reported the day after the Brussels attack.
