When the US declared war on al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the nation’s leaders took the fight to the militant group’s hideouts in Afghanistan, a faraway and failing state, with an invasion and occupation.
However, for Europe’s leaders, who now consider themselves at war with the Islamic State (IS) group after large-scale terrorist attacks at home, the challenge is more complicated: The enemy’s hideouts are ghettoized parts of Paris, Brussels and other European cities that amount to mini-failed states inside their own borders.
While France and Britain have joined the US in bombing IS targets in the Syrian city of Raqqa and other areas controlled by the group, Europe has faced a much harder time understanding and dealing with its own citizens who have abetted the extremists’ ascent. These are mostly third-generation Muslim immigrants, who have become radicalized in poor communities left to develop outside the national culture.
Illustration: Yusha
Those communities are incubators that figure prominently in the IS’ two attacks on Paris since January last year, and the bombing on Tuesday in Brussels.
Resolving the problem, political analysts said, does not require simply more intelligence cooperation and shared lists of people suspected of being radicals and fighters returning from Syria. European governments must also develop internal strategies to deal with the threat at home — the deep social problems of racism and radicalism, along with the security dilemma, which raises concerns about surveillance, justice and civil liberties.
“You can bomb Raqqa and you may consider that to be war, but you’re not going to bomb Molenbeek or Schaerbeek or Saint-Denis, unless you’re ready for civil war,” International Institute for Strategic Studies president Francois Heisbourg said, referring to heavily Muslim areas of Brussels and Paris.
French President Francois Hollande and French Prime Minister Manuel Valls have repeatedly described Europe’s fight against the Islamic State group as war: Heisbourg called that an “extremely dangerous” use of the word.
“It starts with Raqqa and can end up with the Algerian civil war, and that would be the ultimate victory of DAESH,” he said, using a term for the Islamic State group based on its Arabic acronym. “They want to divide our societies against ourselves.”
“Talking of war dignifies DAESH, which wants to be seen as having a state and an army of warriors and martyrs,” he said, adding that for angry, poor and isolated young Muslims in Europe, “to be seen as the downtrodden victims of Western colonialism and iniquity, fighting the holy war against the arrayed legions of the crusaders,” is precisely what the IS advertises.
The dual nature of the European struggle against the IS separates it from the US “global war on terrorism” and deeply complicates it, research institution Royal United Services Institute international security studies director Raffaello Pantucci said.
“We need a dual response,” he said, more bellicose on the IS abroad but less so at home, emphasizing longer-term social work in isolated and disenfranchised communities.
The objective is to counter radical voices who often provide paths into meaning for young men who have been petty criminals, he said, adding that most of the European terrorist suspects were known to local police.
“There is a realization that this is not a war you can bomb or shoot your way out of, but you have to deal with individuals who are radicalized at home, to examine the reasons that they are exploring this other identity,” said Pantucci, who wrote a book on the issue: We Love Death as You Love Life: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists.
Important pockets of the disenfranchised and isolated are embedded in most European countries, he said: The English city of Bradford, heavily Kashmiri and home to the London subway bombers of July 7, 2005; largely Muslim east Birmingham, where organized crime and radicalism spring from the same roots and the heavily immigrant suburbs of France’s big cities.
Belgium, already divided by language and with a plethora of local and state federalisms and police forces, provides a special example. More so than elsewhere, Belgium allowed the self-ghettoization, or self-isolation, of ethnic communities in the name of multiculturalism and peace.
“There are parts of Europe, especially in France and Belgium, where over the past two decades you’ve seen the emergence of essentially ungoverned spaces, nearly akin to Yemen or Libya,” said Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence at King’s College London. “Molenbeek is one of them, a place where local authorities and even mainstream Muslim groups abandoned them, with an informal pact, that ‘as long as we don’t see you, we won’t bother you.’”
Criminal groups, but also Muslim militants, soon “figured out that this local anger could be channeled into radical extremism,” he said.
Resentment and alienation from the state meant that these groups “could enter and work without being hassled by the police, but also found people open to their message,” Heisbourg said, adding that the result was “a disaster for counterterrorism.”
These were “no-go areas for the authorities, who have found it very difficult to get informants and human intelligence,” he said, noting that many of the French citizens who carried out attacks in France lived or were hosted in Brussels neighborhoods such as Molenbeek.
In per capita terms, more Belgians have left to fight with Muslim militants in Syria and Iraq than citizens of any other European country. As of last month, 441 had done so, according to data from the Belgian Ministry of Justice and 117 have returned.
Places such as Molenbeek and Schaerbeek, where the bombs used on Tuesday were thought to have been constructed, have been problems for a long time, Pantucci said.
“One question is whether more could have been or should have been done to understand the local problems and deal with them. Because left alone, over time there is an undercurrent of radical ideologies... and getting rid of that is very, very difficult,” he said.
Some political scientists, such as European University Institute Islam expert Olivier Roy, said Islam does not cause radicalization, but serves as the vehicle for radicalized anger from some Muslim young people.
For that, Europe has few easy answers, especially as the IS seeks to manipulate European fears of terrorism and migration.
French sociologist Gilles Kepel, who has studied radical Islam and the banlieues (suburbs), has argued that part of the IS’ intention is to mobilize fears of the “enemy within,” create further rejection of European Muslim citizens and radicalize them at home, to create a kind of civil war between European Muslims and the “crusader states.”
In dealing with terrorism through denial of nationality, abuses of civil liberties or an indefinite state of emergency, Heisbourg said that “you may create the conditions where you end up with the civil war in European societies that DAESH clearly wants.”
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