Belgium
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2015 7:12 pm
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Why Is a Small Country Producing So Many Jihadists ?
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Why Is a Small Country Producing So Many Jihadists ?
. . most Muslims in the country don't really feel as though they are represented politically.
They used to vote for the Flemish Social Democrats, AlDe'emeh says, but then the government implemented a ban on wearing the burqa and niqab in public.
Today, the influx of radical Islamists is particularly significant in Flemish cities like Antwerp, Mechelen and Vilvoorde in addition to Brussels. It is precisely the same region where the right-wing populist party Vlaams Belang has spent years hounding the Muslim population.
Islam, as practiced in Belgium, is also failing to reach young people, AlDe'emeh says. There are 150 mosques in Flanders, but Arabic is spoken in almost all of them, he says, a language that second-generation immigrant youth can't understand. Instead, they stumble across hate preachers on YouTube and see the suffering of people in Syria. "They travel to Syria to heal themselves," AlDe'emeh says.
In June 2013, he visited a group of Belgian jihadists in Syria; a middleman brought him to the western part of Aleppo. The Belgians were living there in a villa belonging to Syrians who had fled the country. AlDe'emeh spent 15 days with the fighters, who belonged to the Islamist group al-Nusra Front. During the day, they patrolled the front lines and afterwards they would sit on pillows holding their AK-47s and talk about the fight against Bashar Assad. In the evenings, they went swimming or snuck across the border into Turkey to buy Nutella.
The structures inside the al-Nusra Front, AlDe'emeh says, are hierarchical. There is an emir who grants permission to those, like AlDe'emeh himself, who wish to visit. Beneath him are the regional heads who are responsible for specific provinces. They, in turn, control commanders who are responsible for Syrian and Western fighters.
"Everyone knew exactly what he was supposed to do," AlDe'emeh says. "The Belgians were in good spirits. They liked the structures." Likely also because al-Nusra, similar to Islamic State, made young men like Abdel full-fledged members of a nation, fictional though it may be.
Dreaming of Lasagna
In the search for a sense of belonging, many Muslims joined Sharia4Belgium, a terror group that is currently the target of judicial proceedings in Antwerp. Forty-six alleged members of the organization have been charged, all suspected of having recruited fighters in Belgium for the jihad in Syria or of fighting there themselves. They also stand accused of having kept the US journalist James Foley prisoner. He was later decapitated by Islamic State. A verdict in the case is expected to come in February.
SPIEGEL was able to speak with one of the group's members by telephone. His name is Younes Delefortrie, a 26-year-old who was born in Belgium and who speaks perfect English. He says he spent two months in Homs, but insists that he didn't kill anybody. He says he joined Sharia4Belgium because he was uninterested in an Islam that didn't take its own rules seriously.
In Belgium, Delefortrie says, he felt discriminated against, specifically complaining that he hadn't been allowed to pray at work. He also said that there were so many regulations pertaining to the construction of mosques that when they were finished, they looked like garages. "If you spend years pounding on someone, it is only logical that he fights back," Delefortrie says.
Abdel's mother says that she now regularly meets in Brussels with 15 other mothers whose sons are also fighting in Syria. They met on the day after the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Abdel's mother told the gathered women of a dream she had had after seeing so much blood on the television. "I saw my son walking on a street in Paris. He wasn't carrying a weapon. He was peaceful." In the dream, Abdel then came home. He sat down silently in the kitchen and put his hands on the table. She went over to the stove and cooked him his favorite meal. Lasagna.
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