In Molenbeek: Jihadists, Guns and (Drug) Money
6th July 2022
Gunshots. Knifings. Cars being set aflame. All in broad daylight, all on the streets of Molenbeek.
Molenbeek, Belgium, you may recall, was the Brussels neighborhood that was home to almost half of the jihadists responsible for the 2015 Paris attacks and several subsequent terror attacks in Belgium. The bomber of a train at Brussels Central Station in 2017, for instance, lived in Molenbeek. Mehdi Nemmouche, who shot and killed four people at Brussels’ Jewish Museum in 2014, had previously lived in Molenbeek. The mastermind of the Paris killings, Abdelhamid Abboud, grew up and still lived in Molenbeek.
Most of Molenbeek’s population is Moroccan, though immigrants from elsewhere in North Africa and from Eastern Europe have also settled there. It is an area of Brussels where, according to the Oasis Center, an Italian foundation that studies relations between Muslims and Christians, “a type of Islam has been propagated over the decades that, if not radical, has nevertheless prepared the ground in which the radicalism would then take root.”