The suspects who were arrested as part of a large-scale anti-terrorist operation across Belgium on Thursday have links with the Islamic State Khorasan Province terrorist group (ISKP), one of the jihadist group's most lethal branches.
Seven people suspected of participating in terrorist group activities, financing terrorism and preparing a terrorist attack – the group already gathered the necessary material – were arrested in several house searches across Belgium on Thursday. The judicial operation was one of the largest of its kind in recent Belgian history.
While the target of the prepared attack has not yet been confirmed, it is likely the Paris Olympics, starting on Friday. This sped up the Antwerp terror investigators to make arrests so as to not take any chances.
De Standaard reported that the raided terror cell has ties to the IS terror group in the Khorasan Province (the historical name for the area in Central Asia where the branch emerged in 2015). This group claimed the attack in Moscow which killed at least 140 people in March.
Inspiring local sympathisers
ISKP first carried out attacks on its soil, but has set its sights on Europe and the United States in the past couple of years. Western security services consider it to be the biggest terror threat in Europe. It is working to inspire local sympathisers and several ISKP supporters have already been arrested in Europe.
The group is considered a risk by State Security in Belgium too. Over the past year, people with roots in the Central Asian region appeared in several intelligence or judicial files. Outgoing Justice Minister Paul Van Tigchelt said ISKP also poses the biggest Islamic threat to Belgium.
The fact that several people with links to the group were arrested in Belgium indicates that ISKP has dramatically expanded its reach, doing so with a propaganda apparatus published in many languages. It also demonstrates that its capacity to direct terrorists outside Khorasan is no longer purely theoretical.
Within Europe, ISKP members are increasingly in contact with each other across country borders. This breaks with the trend seen in recent years that most threats involve lone actors with no structural links to terrorist or extremist groups. Judicial investigations are ongoing in France, Germany and Austria, with people being arrested who belong to the same network as that of the suspects in Belgium.
Since the terrorist attack in Brussels on 16 October, Belgium's terrorist threat level has been set at 3 on a scale of 1 to 4, meaning that the threat is "possible and probable".
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