The ISIS alumni association of Europe

By Vince Chadwick

A new generation of terrorists moves freely across EU borders and can tap into an international network.

Call them a new European generation of terror.
Coming from across the Continent, thousands of twentysomething men, with a handful of women among them, are heading to Iraq and Syria. Once there, they bond. They train and fight together, forging a common worldview and mission. It’s as if ISIS produced a sequel to “L’Auberge Espagnole,” the classic 2002 coming-of-European-age French film.

Back on European soil, graduated if you will from this terrorist Erasmus program, they’re hard to track. They move easily around, as do all other residents of Europe, and can tap into relationships from their time with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and other militant Islamist groups.
For Western counterterrorism officials, this is the new reality and growing nightmare.
The 25-year-old Moroccan Ayoub el-Khazani, who tried to shoot up a Thalys train zooming toward Paris on Friday, may fit this profile. He was thwarted by passengers, avoiding a possible massacre, and is in custody.
Investigators are looking into his movements and any accomplices, but a familiar pattern is emerging.
Khazani spent seven years in Spain, living in Madrid and Algeciras, then moved to France in 2014, Spanish and French officials said. At some point in the last year and a half, he travelled to Syria, via Turkey, according to news reports.
Khazani lived in Belgium in 2015, according to French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. French newspaper La Voix du Nord reported that Belgian police are investigating Khazani’s possible links to violent Islamists in Verviers who also had Syrian connections. Belgian police in January broke up the alleged terrorist cell in the Belgian city.

The ISIS MO

For many months now, European and American security officials have spoken with growing alarm about the morphing nature of the threat in Europe.
Al Qaeda had focused on carrying out relatively complex terror strikes, mapped out by the top figures in the terror group and involving significant resources, as in the September 11 attacks. More recently its AQAP offshoot in Yemen was similarly ambitious in trying to bring down airplanes over American soil.
By contrast, officials said, ISIS exerts little command or control over the militants who come back to Europe. The group encourages them to act on their own, drawing on their training and contacts from Syria and Iraq.
They have looked for softer targets of opportunity. Look at the deadly attack last year on the Jewish Museum in Brussels allegedly perpetrated by a Frenchman of North African origin who had a spent a year in Syria. A train is another such target.
Some 20,000 volunteers have joined militant Sunni groups in Syria and Iraq, according to a January study by King’s College in London. A fifth of them are residents or citizens of EU countries. In sheer numbers, France leads the way with some 1,200. In per capita terms, Belgium is tops. Up to a third of these foreign fighters have since come back to their home countries, the King’s College study said.
The fighters who return to Europe become “rock stars” in their communities and look to recruit others to join in the experience, said Magnus Ranstorp, a counter-terrorism expert who leads an EU working group on the issue. “It’s like an endless cycle, micro-loops going back, which is very difficult for the authorities to follow,” he said.

Vulnerable Belgium

Belgium has long been seen as a soft underbelly of the European counterterrorism effort.
French and British intelligence and police services have for decades grappled with international terrorism. Belgium has a Balkanized police structure, befitting a nation divided by languages and ethnicities, and a purely local counterterrorism focus and capability. U.S. and EU officials said the Belgians in particular are hard pressed to keep track of residents or citizens who have fought in the Middle East, a shortcoming that its allies have sought to help them overcome.
Khazani’s recent stay in Belgium, potential links to the cell in Verviers and his ability to board the Thalys in Brussels unnoticed while armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, nine clips of ammunition and an automatic pistol is renewing concerns about security in Belgium.
The Moroccan was brought to the attention of Belgian authorities by other European security services as a “potential jihadist” and placed on a watch list. “[He] was known by the security service for radical ideas,” said a spokesperson for Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens. “That doesn’t mean he would commit an attack.”
The Belgian government announced more patrols and security checks in the wake of Friday’s attack, and called for a meeting with German, Dutch and French ministers to step up identity and baggage checks.
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said part of the problem is the EU’s Schengen zone that lets travelers move relatively freely without documentation among 26 states.
“There were no material or concrete elements allowing [Belgian authorities] to situate [Khazani], to know at what moment exactly he could have lived, maybe in Belgium,” Michel told RTLINFO. “It seems that he was someone who traveled within Europe,” he said, adding that “freedom of movement is also used with the objective to harm by those with bad intentions.”
A European Commission spokesperson said, “We don’t intend to change Schengen, which is non-negotiable,” but added that further security checks are compatible with the agreement as long as “they do not have an effect equivalent to border checks.”

Terrorists without borders

Ranstorp said those planning an attack operate in multiple countries precisely to evade surveillance.
“The security services work together, but they don’t work that well together — it’s not seamless,” he said. “Therefore it’s a smart way to operate. They learn how to evade, they learn how to stay under the radar, they learn how to maximize their chance of success.”

The EU has tried to coordinate security better ever since the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, which in part were planned on European soil.

Four months after 9/11, the EU agreed to a common definition of terrorism and asked all members to criminalize it. Before then less than half the bloc’s members had anti-terror laws on their books, hampering the ability of countries to work together. An EU-wide arrest warrant came in 2004, also to improve cross-border cooperation between security services.
Then as now, the Continent is grappling with a structural handicap: While Schengen has eliminated internal borders, the EU has no common police or immigration services and few formal ways for countries to cooperate on counterterrorism. And individual countries differ widely in their approaches to counterterrorism.
Belgium is vulnerable due to the relatively small size of its state security apparatus, compared for example to neighboring France, and overlapping crime networks, including gun running, Ranstorp said. It also had a more laissez-faire approach to counterterrorism than either Britain or France, which for decades have been terrorist targets. “Until Syria, the Belgian security services were not as operationally offensive against these kind of networks,” he said.

The Verviers raid

The killings at the Jewish museum were the first Islamist attack on Belgian soil, which officials cite as a sort of wake-up call. Terrorism expert Claude Moniquet of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center pointed to the successful anti-terror raid in Verviers as evidence of a changed Belgium.
One week after the attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Belgian police stormed a property in the industrial town in the country’s east. In the ensuing gunfight two occupants were killed, with authorities finding Kalashnikovs, bomb-making equipment and police clothes. At the time, police said members of the group had recently returned from Syria and were planning an imminent attack.
Since then, soldiers are a regular presence on the streets of Brussels, guarding sites such as the European Parliament and Jewish schools.
Malik Ben Achour, 36, a Socialist Party councilor who has lived in Verviers all his life, blamed the appeal of extremist Islam through groups like ISIS on “symbolic segregation” through “the normalized and constant stigmatization of Islam.”
“The attraction of jihadism for young Europeans is the symptom of a kind of democratic breakdown,” he said.