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[Walpurgis]

Radicalisation in Molenbeek: 'People call me the mother of a terrorist'

[19 year old] Anis had travelled from Molenbeek with a close friend and the younger brother of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind behind the Paris attacks. All three are thought by counter-terrorist officials to have joined the Belgian and French “brigade” within Isis, though his mother doubts this. She says he was in charge of logistics, but does not know for which group.

“People call me the mother of a terrorist. I am not. They talk about radicalisation, but they don’t really understand what that means,” said Geraldine, a 50-year-old financial administrator who converted to Islam 25 years ago and married a man of Moroccan origin.

Her son, fluent in Flemish and French as well as classical and colloquial Arabic, had attended a local school. He had not been the best student – “a bit of a brawler, easily led, but popular”, according to his mother – but had decent basic qualifications and was a keen sportsman. The family were not poor. But then nor were those of the three Paris attackers raised in Molenbeek. The Abdelsalaam family – one brother blew himself up on the rue de Voltaire, while another is on the run – lost social housing benefits when their declared revenue passed €100,000 three years ago, according to Le Monde newspaper.

And if Geraldine and her husband were practising Muslims, who prayed five times a day and fasted, Anis was less observant. “He had always been laid-back about that kind of thing,” she said. This, too, appears to have been the case with the Paris attackers, who were reportedly drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis until relatively recently.

Anis was radicalised over just a few months. “He had left school and been trying to get jobs. It was difficult. It’s tough for all the youngsters but if you’ve an immigrant background doubly so. He started to say that people saw him as Moroccan while in Morocco they saw him as Belgian and asked me ’who am I?’” Geraldine said. Within weeks, Anis started talking about Palestine and Israel, then Syria and then about Islam, saying that it was the duty of all Muslims to help those in distress.

“He was arguing with my husband, sometimes violently, about the meaning of the Qur’an. He said it was obligatory for us to go to Syria, and if we wouldn’t, then he would,” Geraldine said.

When his parents realised they could not dissuade him from travelling, they told the police “anti-radicalisation cell” in Molenbeek, believing the authorities would stop their son leaving. A week later, Anis called his mother. He was in Turkey, he told her, and would be in Syria within hours. A magistrate, she later learned, had decided that as Anis was an adult, it was not possible to impose a travel ban. The friend who left with Anis was killed shortly after their arrival in Syria. “I was speaking to him every week more or less. When his friend died, I heard doubt in his voice for the first time. But not for long,” said Geraldine.

[...] In weekly conversations Geraldine encountered “two different Anis”. One was “his mother’s son”, the other a hardline fanatic, who stopped talking to his father on the telephone after repeatedly telling him he was a coward and a “bad Muslim” for living among unbelievers.

“Sometimes we just talked about home, about what was happening, about his sister. Others times – when I think other people could hear him – he was very harsh. Once he asked me if I would buy a ticket for him from Turkey to a third country, so he could leave Syria without coming back to Belgium. I said, of course. But hours later he told me to forget it.”

Anis was killed during an attack near the strategically important airport at Deir Ezzor, a town in eastern Syria held by Isis.

Research from Oxford University confirms the importance of social networks, showing friends or peers played the primary role in the recruitment of three-quarters of foreign fighters to Isis. Family members accounted for a fifth, mosques for just one in 20.

I wonder what the “anti-radicalisation cell” in Molenbeek was doing.

Anyway, it seems that a major reason for people to join ISIS is for identity. Poverty wasn't a factor with the Paris attackers or this guy but it is a factor for others. I think the common link between them is identity issues and social exclusion, which is generally exacerbated by poverty. The high profile attacks that these men commit intensifies that social exclusion and perpetuates the cycle. Another contributor to this social exclusion is segregation and unemployment.

These neighbourhoods are not only segregated but overcrowded as well as poor. Molenbeek is the second poorest neighbourhood in all of Belgium with 30% overall unemployment and 50% youth unemployment. Discrimination against foreign surnames has been documented and is a common complaint among residents. The hijab/face veil bans also raised tensions. Molenbeek has a bad reputation for crime to boot. As such, Belgium produces the highest number of foreign fighters per capita in Europe.

But it doesn't have to be this way. The Belgian town of Vilvoorde, like Molenbeek, was infamous as a hotbed for radicalism, producing 28 foreign fighters for Syria since 2011. In 2013, Hans Bonte was elected as the town's mayor. He immediately implemented a community oriented plan to end the town's production of foreign fighters. Since May 2014, not a single person has left Vilvoorde to die in Syria. Hans Bonte's astonishing success impressed U.S. president Barack Obama, inviting him to address a White House terrorism summit last year.

Vilvoorde: The Brussels district fighting radicalisation with kindness

“We need to recognise that when young people feel isolated and lonely, they become vulnerable to this ideology,” said Mr Bonte. “If we want to deal with this, we have to open our doors to these men, and to the families, the friends, the girlfriends, the brothers. We have to make them feel welcome. We have to give them support and warmth.”
[...]
Most of the new residents of [Vilvoorde] have foreign origins, and now account for 43 per cent of its population. Nearly half of them are unemployed. The social shift explains why the jihadists’ recruitment drive initially succeeded.

“They indoctrinate with the same message: ‘You are born to be a hero,’” Mr Bonte says. “They say: ‘You can be someone. You can be the one and only. You can lead the caliphate. You don’t need these school troubles, these job worries, this family life.’ They say you are unemployed because you are Muslim; you are not accepted because you are Muslim. They say the cowards stay here: the real heroes go to Syria.”
[...]
The mayor admits his response, what he calls the “Vilvoorde method”, was a shot in the dark. “There was no manual for this sort of problem,” he says. He called on two women to help him: Jessika Soors, a deradicalisation official and a PhD student in Islamic studies, and Fatima Lamarti, the daughter of Vilvoorde’s first Muslim immigrant, and Mr Bonte’s councillor for social integration.
[...]
The essence of the approach was local trust: if anyone is seen as a potential jihadist recruit, family, friends, teachers and mosques spring into action to talk him out of it. It is the reverse of the radicalisation process.

“We have to see the individual stories behind each radicalisation,” Mr Bonte says. “We have to build tailor-made strategies. If we know Mohammed is being radicalised, we gather round tables of people who can influence him. We surround him so that he can reconnect with social life. We say, ‘We see you have some problems, but really, going to Syria is a terrible idea. And it’s not even part of the Koran.”