An email from the Belgian police revealed that Afghan refugees arriving in Belgium will include traffickers, extremists, terrorism recruiters and violent criminals. In addition, according to the Belgian police, “some young Afghans, already in the country’s reception centers, behave very violently”.
As reported by the Flemish newspaper Het Nieuwsblad, there are groups on the social media platform Tiktok that call for violence. The worrying thing is that some individuals are involved with Islamic religious recruitment, claiming to be adherents of a strict Islam to be introduced to Belgium. The federal police and Minister of the Interior Annelies Verlinden (CD&V) fear that extremely violent or fundamentalist persons could travel with the Afghan migrants who are expected in Belgium. This was apparent from an internal email reported by the Mediahuis newspapers.
The mail was specifically addressed to the services that have asylum centers under their supervision. The same e-mail also showed that some of the Afghans who were already housed in the asylum centers were behaving very violently.
Belgium has meanwhile stopped evacuations due to an “imminent threat of a suicide attack”. The Belgian government was informed on Wednesday that there was an imminent threat of a suicide attack at the airport in the Afghan capital Kabul. Information about this had arrived “at the military level” from American and other sources, after which the federal government decided to stop the ongoing evacuations via operation Red Kite, Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said at a press conference on Thursday.
Prime Minister De Croo also tried to calm fears of possible Taliban jihadists entering Belgium. He said that anyone who is transferred from Kabul to Islamabad and from there to Melsbroek and Peutie in Belgium was checked four times: Each name is checked against the lists of the Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis, the State Security Service, the military intelligence service and the federal police. “It is important that the people we take with us have a right to that, but of course we don’t want to take anyone who could pose a danger.”
Vlaams Belang politician Filip Dewinter mocked the government’s notion of “Flemish families” returning to Belgium, tweeting a clip of Muslims arriving in the country from Kabul.
The Flemish Member of Parliament warned that “the demise of Afghanistan can indeed have an impact on our security”. The chaos at the airport of the capital of Afghanistan obstructs the operations of identification of the Afghans before embarking on the Western military flights.
For example, in Antwerp, where 8000 Afghans live, there is also a fear that conflicts will be imported from the Asian country, Dewinter pointed out. “A more than justified fear, in a city where figures such as Abdul Hameed and Mohammad Khalil, who are part of the Pakistani jihad movement Khatme Nubuwwat, are allowed to quietly and undisturbedly recruit supporters for the Taliban and for Muslim terrorists in Kashmir,” said Dewinter, who also a municipal councilor. “And from the jihad mosque Khatim-Ul-Anbia in Biekorfstraat, young people recruited every year leave for Pakistani Peshawar, more specifically to Madrassa Darul Uloom Haqqania, a training camp for Taliban terrorists.”
The Vlaams Belang member demanded the ban on the Pakistani jihad movement Khatme Nubuwwat. “That movement organizes an annual conference in our country,” said Dewinter. “And they have a department in Antwerp to which the jihad mosque Khatim-Ul-Anbia belongs.”
Since the change of power in Kabul, increased vigilance against terror was absolutely necessary he said. “Where the Taliban in Afghanistan previously used Chinese Kalashnikovs, the terrorist organization now has American M4 and AR-15 rifles at its disposal,” Dewinter continued.
“Modern weaponry with which Islamic terrorism can henceforth not only equip itself on the spot, but which can also be used in the training of terrorists. The Taliban may thank the US military for the $83 billion it has spent over 20 years building and equipping the Afghan military.”
It is therefore strictly necessary that those who give sermons in the Afghan and Pakistani mosques are screened, “something that should have happened much sooner,” Dewinter concluded. “In addition, Taliban members and sympathizers should be actively tracked down by the police, including through online monitoring and local neighborhood searches, and deported without mercy.
According to German Refugee Minister Joachim Stamp from then federal state of North Rhein Westphalia (NRW), “individual cases” of returning jihadists will not deter the Merkel administration from welcoming Afghans. According to its own information, the ministry still has no evidence that such people have come to NRW.
It is sadly these “individual cases” that have been responsible for terrorist attacks on EU soil. And these jihadists have been transported to Germany already.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior in Berlin announced on Monday that there were Afghans who had come back to Germany via evacuation flights who had previously committed serious crimes and had been deported. Only “low single-digit number” were noted by the police, a spokesman for the Federal Ministry of the Interior said.