In the troubled Brussels district of Molenbeek, politician Sarah Turine is on the front line of her own war to stop the sons of Belgian families from going off to Syria to join Islamic State fighters.
The first step is often to send a sociologist and psychologist to try to re-establish the link between the troubled young man and his family. The next is to flag up the dire consequences of the choice they seem to be about to make.
“We must try to defuse this anger among the young,” Turine, who oversees a radicalization prevention program in Molenbeek, told reporters over tea at an upscale Arab cafe.
“We have to assure them they have a place here, that they are not second-class citizens, and to undermine the recruiters’ arguments,” said Turine, a member of the left-wing Ecolo Party.
Belgium has come under fire for failing to crack down on the radicalization of its youth since the Paris attacks this month left 130 people killed by extremists, many of whom lived in or had links to the impoverished immigrant district of Molenbeek.
Community leaders say Molenbeek presents a toxic mix of reasons its youth are becoming radicalized: high unemployment, lack of career prospects, drug abuse, petty crime and isolation from Belgium’s non-Muslim majority.
Bilal, a 21-year-old Muslim resident of the district, said recruiters from the Islamic State group that claimed the Paris attacks convinced about a dozen of his male and female friends to join their cause in Syria.
He said recruiters played on his friends’ guilt over their “craze for nightlife,” their relations with the opposite sex and “brushes with the law.”
They also whipped up a sense of injustice over perceived Western meddling in Middle East events, said Bilal, who himself resisted repeated recruitment bids.
“Recruiters target the weak,” he told reporters.
Olivier Vanderhaeghen, an administrator for Turine’s prevention program, said he and his colleagues, working with schools, social workers and others, try to restore the community and family ties that young people break when they are lured by radicals.
“First, the young person will break with his or her network, he will break with his friends, he will break with his school, his sporting club,” he said. “Second, he will no longer frequent the same public places... In the third and last phase, he will break with his family.”
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