Belgium Warned of Attacks. It Wasn't Enough.

MAR 22, 2016 9:17 AM EDT
By Josh Rogin

Only days ago in Brussels, as Western leaders celebrated the arrest of a key terrorist suspect, Belgian officials warned that there were dozens more jihadists at large in the city and that more attacks were being planned. They couldn’t have known how right they were.

I traveled to Brussels on March 16, to attend the German Marshall Fund's Brussels Forum, a meeting of U.S. and European officials, foreign policy experts and journalists, where the fight against terrorism was at the top of the agenda. Two U.S. senators and several Obama administration officials who attended had just passed through the main terminal of the Brussels airport. On Tuesday morning, it was hit by what Belgian authorities described as a suicide attack. At least 26 were killed and many more wounded at the airport, and in a parallel attack on the city's subway system.

When I passed through the terminal less than 24 hours before the attack, an increased security presence was visible. But as with most Western airports, there were no individual checks of passengers entering the main building, which was crowded with arriving and departing passengers on a busy weekday morning. Tensions were already high. On my flight from Dulles, there had been two security related delays. One man was arrested for assaulting a flight attendant, after he refused to follow instructions from the flight crew.

Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders spoke to the Brussels Forum on Sunday morning and detailed the successful efforts to arrest Salah Abdeslam, believed to be one of the main plotters of the Paris attacks in November. He was captured in the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek.

Abdeslam told Belgian authorities while in custody that “he was ready to restart something from Brussels,” Reynders said. Belgian intelligence determined that Abdeslam had built a new network of support in Brussels in the four months since the Paris attacks, expanding to include criminal networks that worked with the terrorists to share apartments and leverage connections to procure weapons.

--CLIP
For the American officials and experts who traveled through the Brussels airport this past weekend, this was a close call. Whether that will result in a change in how the U.S. thinks about the fight against the Islamic State remains to be seen.


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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-22/belgium-warned-of-attacks-it-wasn-t-enough