Washington Institute warns against possible attacks in Belgium

Rubeir al-Fares

Three renowned terrorism experts warned recently against potential terrorist attacks in Belgium, against the background of the attacks that had already taken place in France.

The experts, who spoke during a virtual seminar host by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, delved in detail into the conditions of jihadist groups in Europe.

One of the experts participating in the seminar, Lorence Bendinar, said terror attacks in France just keep on coming.

She added that in late September, two people were seriously wounded in a knife attack by a young Pakistani refugee outside the former office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had just republished cartoon caricatures of Muhammad.

In 2015, the initial publication of the images sparked an attack that outraged much of the West—the massacre of 12 people at the magazine’s newsroom. In mid-October, an 18-year-old Chechen Russian refugee who had grown up in France beheaded Samuel Paty, a teacher, for having shown the cartoons in a civics class devoted to free speech, she added.

She noted that Paty was slaughtered for “blasphemy” just outside his school in the Paris suburb of Yvelines.

The country was still reeling from his brutal murder when, less than two weeks later, a 21-year-old Tunisian killed three people and injured many more at Notre Dame Basilica in the southern city of Nice, she said.

She added that the assailant, who had been in the country less than a month, slit the church sacristan’s throat, cut a woman’s neck so deeply that the police described it as an attempt to decapitate her, and stabbed a third victim multiple times; she died after staggering out of the neo-Gothic church.

Only four years earlier in that same city, another Tunisian had driven a truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day on July 14, killing 86 people, she said.