Brussels Airport is slowly getting back to normal with three flights leaving the Airport today, marking an important milestone since the bombings 12 days ago that killed 16 people in the airport and another 16 in the subway, according to the Associated Press.
The AP reports that officials say the airport may reach 20 percent of capacity tomorrow but won't be fully operational again until at least summer. European authorities continue to make arrests of Islamic State militants they link to the Brussels bombings and to the attacks in Paris last November that killed 130.
On Tuesday, March 22, the day of the Brussels bombings, WGBH Morning Edition host Bob Say spoke with Matthew Levitt, Director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Levitt was working with officials in Brussels days before the bombings to prevent this type of threat. He tells WGBH that Brussels counterterrorism police and intelligence officials had been worried about exactly these kind of attacks.
The numbers ( of radical extremists in Brussels) are overwhelming.
He says, “they understand that they have both the problems of radicalization at home with people going abroad to places like Syria, Iraq and now Libya, and also people who are returning like Salah Abdeslam who’ve they captured on Friday March, 18.” He says there were also worries of people, who might never have left Brussels and are listening to calls of the Islamic State leaders to carrying out attacks at home. The numbers (of radical extremists) are simply overwhelming. “
The number of people in neighborhoods like Molenbeek, which is three or four metro stops from the EU center of Brussels, right across from the stop which was bombed, is an almost ghettoized community. It has 100,000 people, highly transient, about 10 percent of the population comes and goes every year. It’s the second tourist municipality in the country, the second youngest municipality in the country and it has 40 mosques, almost none are formal, many are all storefront type mosques, and Salafism is mainstream here. Not every Salafist is a terrorist, but most of the terrorists are Salafists.”
He says officials can’t prevent every attack, but Belgium and France authorities have been fairly successful in preventing attacks and have been quite lucky. He points to the attack that was plotted on a train from Brussels to Paris and was thwarted by off-duty US servicemen.
"There’s just not enough people to tail everybody and intercept every phone. There aren’t even enough local police, and it will be a struggle to cope with the scale and scope of the threats," he says. Levitt says terrorists are targeting where they can in Europe, but Brussels has the problem of having the largest per-capita number of western foreign fighters going to places like Syria, Iraq and now Libya.
Levitt says the terrorism threat and concern is vastly different here in the U.S. than overseas because unlike the U.S., Belgium has a divided federal system, making it difficult for law enforcement to communicate with one another and cross through different police precincts. He says the U.S. has a highly, highly integrated intelligence system through state, local and federal levels through along with joint-terrorism task forces. He says the U.S. also has a much smaller problem with the radicalization of foreign terrorist fighters, somewhere under 300 people who have gone or tried to go overseas and have been thwarted. He says, "there are FBI cases in all field offices, in all 50 states, which means the FBI has its ear to the ground. He says there’s no such thing as 100 percent prevention, and that there will be more cases and there will be more plots. But he says here in the United State much of the infrastructure to fight terrorism came about as a result of 9/11, which some of our allies such as Belgium, did not institute."
