Belgium concerned by ISIS members returning home
This post is also available in: 
עברית (Hebrew)
Belgium is the main source for European fighters in ISIS.
The country’s law enforcement officials fear that at least seventy of some 350 Belgian fighters have returned home equipped with skills they learned on the battlefield.
According to Home Land Security News Wire, the Belgian government had brought the concern to national attention in an October document warning about the “danger of violent jihadism that threatens to spread in our society”.
Belgian officials have not found a link between the Paris attacks in the beginning of January and any planned attacks in Belgium in the following days – attacks thwarted by swift police preemptive action. Nevertheless, common elements of all these attacks include a clustering of radicals in a small area, the connection between petty criminality and jihadist violence, and the role of prison as an incubator for extremism.
After the Belgian police raided a residence in the city of Verviers on 15 January, they focused their counterterrorism efforts on the Molenbeek district of Brussels.
Register to iHLS Israel Homeland Security
Belgium’s capital is nevertheless its second poorest area, with a 40 percent youth unemployment rate and an immigrant community with twenty-two mosques known to local officials. By comparison, there are merely five churches which operate underground.
“The network that was dismantled in Verviers is a network that had its origins in Molenbeek,” said Franoise Schepmans, the mayor of Molenbeek. “That is evident. They just rented a hideaway at Verviers.”
It is believed that Molenbeek has been a breeding ground for Islamic extremism partly due to the role of “Sharia4Belgium”. This is a local campaign set up in 2010 to promote Islamic law, which later focused on recruiting fighters bound for Syria. The group’s leader, 32-year old Fouad Belkacem, has a long arrest record for petty crimes including theft and assault, but went on trial last September for belonging to a terrorist group and brainwashing young people. A verdict in his case was due in January but has now been postponed.
