Belgian terror attack is another crisis for troubled Europe

BERLIN — In recent days, Belgian politicians had been warning of a heightened terror threat in Brussels after the arrest of one of the prime players in the November attacks in Paris.

In fact, after his arrest, Salah Abdeslam, 26, admitted that he’d been planning attacks in Brussels, and police recovered weapons indicating that he was telling the truth.

So Tuesday morning, shortly after 9 a.m., when explosions rocked the city, the targets couldn’t have been less surprising: the check-in counters at the busy Brussels Airport and the Maelbeek subway stop near the offices of the European Parliament and the European Commission.

Airports and subways are classic terror targets — easily reached, crowded and lightly guarded. Even the timing, rush hour on mass transit, was predictable — commuters aboard public transit were bombed in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005.

Yet the attacks went off. As Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said after the attacks: “What we feared has happened.”

Europe today is under siege, and the Islamic State, in claiming responsibility for the 34 deaths and scores of injured in Brussels, promised more to come. “Germany is next,” the Islamic State’s statement vowed.

An attack in Brussels, home to the headquarters of the European Union, was particularly troubling. “This was an attack on all of Europe,” French President Francois Hollande said Tuesday.

And it’s not just terrorists besieging the continent. Europe is in trouble on many levels. The EU is struggling. Its currency, the euro, is wobbly. Greece, a member, seems broken. France often looks to be breaking. The British are threatening to leave. Russia is working hard to undermine the EU, funding nationalist political parties whose goals include breaking up the union.

All against a backdrop of a burgeoning refugee crisis that began with flight from Libya, then became, starting nearly a year ago, wave after wave of Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and others, fleeing from Turkey to Greece and then by land primarily to Germany, more than a million people in all.

Add to that terror attacks that have come with unprecedented frequency: first in Paris, in January 2015, when three gunmen killed 17 at a satirical newspaper. Then came attacks in Tunisia and Mali that killed British and French tourists. In November came the worst attack in modern French history: Gunmen killed 130 people in Paris in a violent rampage across the city. Tuesday, it was Brussels’ turn.

Brussels had been a terror target before, but not on this scale. As such the city joined the list of European cities that have been hit by large-scale terror attacks. It’s a list that includes Paris, London, Madrid, Istanbul and Oslo. The list of nations suffering through terror attacks can be expanded far beyond Europe, with recent attacks also in places including the United States, Tunisia, Cameroon, Nigeria, Chad, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Israel.

Only Monday, Jan Jambon, the Belgian interior minister, had told Belgian public radio that Abdeslam’s capture put the country on alert.

“We know that stopping one cell can push others into action,” he said in that interview. “We are aware of it in this case.”

And on Sunday, Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders noted Abdeslam had warned he had been planning an attack in Brussels.

“He was ready to restart something in Brussels, and it may be the reality because we have found a lot of weapons, heavy weapons, in the first investigations and we have found a new network around him in Brussels,” he said.

But still there was little officials could do to stop the attacks, said Mark Singleton, director of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague.

“Even advanced warnings based on intel don’t offer guarantees,” he said in an email. “These attacks confirm how little resources are needed to wreak havoc.”

He added, “There’s only so much you’ll know. And even if you know a lot more, you’ll still not always be able to predict, interdict and incarcerate before it’s too late.”