His family and friends were stunned. One friend told the local newspaper SudInfo: “He doesn’t even speak Arabic very well.”
On Friday, the day after Belgian police killed two extremists during a raid in Verviers, a CNN crew met Hagaoui’s mother and sister at her home, just a few hundred yards from the scene of the shoot-out. At the time, Belgian media were suggesting he may have returned to Verviers and been killed in the police raid.
They were too upset to talk; at that moment, they had no idea whether Redouane was alive or dead. The imam of the local mosque, Franck Hensch, told CNN they had not seen Redouane since 2013. He had been a serious but kind boy and had worked in a local restaurant, the imam said.
Hensch and the president of the mosque M’Hamed Bouchlagham said that extremism was not common among Muslims in Verviers but that fewer young people were attending the mosque and instead were being influenced elsewhere.
While the identities of the two men killed in the police raid have not been disclosed, it now seems Hagaoui is still alive and likely still in Syria or Iraq — one of dozens of young Belgian men and women who have left their dreary, industrial towns to wage jihad in Iraq and Syria.
A recent study by the Brookings Institution in Washington estimated that at least 250 individuals have left Belgium — fewer than the number from Britain and France but the highest in Europe when measured per capita. Other sources put the number above 300.
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Four people were shot dead at the museum in Brussels last year. The alleged assailant — a French national named Mehdi Nemmouche — was arrested in France, highlighting the additional problem posed by Europe’s open borders: 26 European states are part of the Schengen Agreement, which abolished passport and immigration controls between signatories.
In Paris, analysts and former officers in the security services have long been critical of the lack of collaboration between France’s police and the domestic and foreign intelligence services in the wake of the Paris attacks. That lack of communication became apparent after the Toulouse shootings in 2012, when Mohamed Merah killed seven people across several days in Toulouse.
Governments in northern Europe now face threats on multiple fronts, from loosely-organized cells with ready access to weapons, and in many cases the expertise to use them.
Last July Chams Eddine Zaougui and Peter van Ostaeyen warned in the New York Times that “Policy makers’ unrealistic obsession with foreign fighters could be a distraction from a more serious domestic terrorist threat.”
The unfortunate lesson to be drawn from recent events in Paris and Belgium is that policy makers now need to focus on both.
