Will Dutch Counterterrorism Methods Force Muslims To Betray Each Other?
HAARLEM, Netherlands — The name had cropped up a few weeks earlier: a young Dutch Muslim man who had led an uneventful life, but had suddenly started appearing on the radar of police as a troublemaker. He was 20 years old, had grown a long, bushy beard, and was getting into confrontations with officers on the streets. Neighbors said he had stopped hanging around with his old friends and was increasingly staying in his room, where he was…doing what? Reading? Becoming isolated and depressed? Watching internet porn? Or was he connecting online with ISIS? No one knew.
This is where Salem el-Idrissi stepped in. The 30-year-old social worker turned up at the young man’s home one morning in March, and rang the doorbell. His mother answered the door of their apartment in a housing complex in Haarlem, a city of 200,000 just to the west of Amsterdam. She let Idrissi in, and he explained that he was worried about her son. He banged on the bedroom door. “I woke him up,” Idrissi said. “He was surprised to see me. I said: ‘Stand up. Get dressed. Let’s get a tea.’”
“I said, ‘Your family is worried.’ I made contact with him without saying where I am going with it.” The young man was startled, but eventually got dressed and came along.
You have to work slowly to build up trust, explained Idrissi, who is employed by a government-funded outreach program called Streetcornerwork. Idrissi, whose parents immigrated from Morocco, grew up in the neighborhood he works in. Muscular in build, he wears a slight beard, and favors baseball caps and tracksuits, blending in easily among the kids and teens he counsels.
“From the beginning we see the bad kids, because we see everybody growing up,” he said, as he drove his small sedan through the streets on his daily rounds of Schalkwijk, a warren of high- and low-rise public housing in Haarlem. Here you’ll find bakeries selling fresh Turkish simit, something like a bagel with sesame seeds, and Ayran yogurt drinks, while North African grocery stores offer all manner of couscous from Morocco. “We’re targeting individuals and mapping them and seeing who they are. We’re there before something happens. Every individual we don’t think is on a good path we zoom in on. Criminalization and radicalization — we take them together.”
Following the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, law enforcement and intelligence agencies across the continent are in a panic, as they struggle to identify potential recruits to Islamic extremism. An influx of refugees to Europe from predominantly Muslim countries such as Syria, Iraq, and beyond has heightened paranoia. Police raids on Muslim neighborhoods, clampdowns on mosques, and aggressive electronic surveillance of suspected radicals have often served to alienate the very people they are trying to reach.
Idrissi is on the frontline of a very different approach adopted in the Netherlands, which sees street-level social workers, counselors, and community activists go deep into their communities to engage with young people, and talk to them about the temptations of violence, criminality, and extremist political and religious groups.
Salem el-Idrissi plays pool with a couple of boys in a
youth center in Haarlem.
Joris van Gennip for BuzzFeed News
The idea is that people like Idrissi, with strong bonds to their communities, can discern who’s just blowing off steam and who’s serious about committing acts of violence. But this is no easy feat: The profile of a disaffected young man with small-time criminal plans is not so different from one intent on political or religious violence. And sporting a bushy beard might mean nothing at all.
Idrissi described the spiral of despair, alienation, and anger into which some young Dutch Muslim men fall as their efforts at finding decent jobs and status in the Netherlands fail, part of a broader trend of Western European nations’ inability to integrate even those Muslims born and raised on the continent. “You don’t become radicalized instantly,” Idrissi explained. “You get kicked out of school. You can’t get a job, or you get fired from a job. Your family life is hard.”
“You start developing radical ideas,” he said. “You start believing your idea is the only idea. Only you have the truth.”
"The terrorist networks are ready ... Lots of people in the communities know about it, but are choosing to keep quiet and protect these young people."
That’s when these young men tend to isolate themselves, he said. “That’s the last stage. I don’t see you on the street anymore. You’ve gone too far. On the internet you find another world. You start making contacts with radical groups.”
After confronting the young man at his home, Idrissi began meeting with him for tea at local cafés. One day he brought him to the Streetcornerwork office for some news: He had found the young man a job, working at a car rental agency near Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, a solid entry-level job for a kid with no college degree drifting into a life of criminality or worse.
“I told him to trim the beard,” he said. “I told him to wear a white shirt. ‘Now is the time to change your life. It's your choice.’”
Idrissi reported all of this to his bosses at Streetcornerwork, who then reported back to the police.
Idrissi talks to kids in Haarlem.
Joris van Gennip for BuzzFeed News
On November 2, 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was gunned down in the streets as he cycled to work. His killer, 26-year-old Mohammad Bouyeri, was the Dutch-born son of Moroccan immigrants. After shooting Van Gogh more than a dozen times, he slashed his throat, and attempted to behead him, before pinning a note to his body. In it he decried Van Gogh’s film Submission, which the filmmaker said was designed to challenge Islamic orthodoxies by showing naked women with Qur'anic verses painted on their bodies. Bouyeri also threatened to kill the Somali immigrant turned anti-Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, then a member of the Dutch parliament.
Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose murder shocked
the Netherlands.
Bruno Press / Getty Images
The irreverent, chain-smoking Van Gogh was an avowed atheist, who mocked everything from Islam to the Netherland's "multicultural" self-image and the country's monarchy. His murder shattered the Dutch view of itself as a liberal, tolerant, mixed society. Bouyeri had grown up in Slotervaart, a heavily immigrant district of Amsterdam a short bike ride from the coffee shops and red-light district seen by most tourists. But the more that authorities looked into his background, the more they could see the warning signs. Bouyeri came from a troubled family and had struggled to integrate both into mainstream of Dutch society, but also to connect with religious leaders.
Programs like Streetcornerwork predated Van Gogh’s death. But with his assassination and the subsequent rise of ISIS, their mandate to help connect to alienated Muslim youth became more urgent.
“Schools, mosques, key figures, communities and front line-workers are in contact with youth that is vulnerable to radicalization,” said a 2014 strategy paper prepared by Dick Schoof, the Netherlands’ National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism, and distributed to local governments. “They can notice changes and get into contact with these kids. Early signaling and targeted intervention are at the core of the prevention measures.”
But it’s not a simple task to identify potential extremists. Dutch authorities insist there is no clear pattern as to why some young people end up following a radical path. “It has become clear that there is no unique social, ethnic or psychological profile of persons who radicalize,” the strategy paper continued. “There is no direct link with social-economic, pedagogical or educational deprivation. Why someone gets convinced of the way of extremism strictly depends on personal context.”
But Martien Kuitenbrouwer, a former mayor of West Amsterdam, who has investigated radicalization for the past decade, said years of paying close attention to the Muslim community had yielded some valuable insights about who becomes an extremist and why. Criminality and jihadism “are part of the same stick,” she said. “Nearly all the kids who go to Syria have a background in crime.”
“I don’t think it’s about the religion,” she said. “It’s people in a huge identity crisis, that can be religious, as well. And they are vulnerable to any organization that promises them something valuable, whether a job or a glorious end in Syria.”
The Netherlands has produced only around 22 foreign fighters per 100,000 Muslims — less than a third of the number produced by neighboring Belgium — lending a measure of credence to the Dutch approach to preventing radicalization. Germany also has a large Muslim population and has similarly produced relatively few foreign fighters per capita, but German Muslims are largely of Turkish origin, with strong community and linguistic bonds.
“A cop called me piss stain ... I told him, ‘Ever had a look in the mirror?’”
In recent months, European officials have looked to the Dutch model, traveling to the Netherlands to meet some of the street-level counselors, while the U.S. Justice Department two years ago launched an experimental program to use similar techniques to counter radicalization.
But the increasing use of such programs as intelligence-gathering mechanisms in the Netherlands risks undermining the same liberal and tolerant values they were intended to protect. Social workers and counselors hired to serve as bridges between the country’s various communities are being placed in the awkward position of determining for law enforcement, sometimes without their own knowledge, which kids are just acting out, which are headed into hardcore criminality, and which might be turning into violent extremists.
Street Coach Bonny Karangwa briefs his team in
Amsterdam.
Joris van Gennip for BuzzFeed News
Idrissi and his colleagues keep files on the kids they watch over and pass them on to the municipal government officials, including the police. Neighborhood social workers meet with police regularly to decide whether a case needs to be referred to local political leaders, or to national-level counterterrorism authorities.
“Every municipality has a safe house, a table where care workers join the police and other services,” said Edmond Messchaert, the spokesman for the Ministry of Security and Justice, which oversees the counterterrorism office. “The police are there to relay information to relevant authorities in case there is a threat to national security.”
The Netherlands hasn’t been struck in the recent wave of terrorist attacks launched in Paris and Brussels. But many wonder if it’s just been lucky. Amsterdam cleric Yassin Elforkani stunned the country last month when he warned that dozens of young Dutch Muslim men had drifted so deep into radicalism they couldn’t be turned back and that a terror attack would be imminent. He predicted that Amsterdam was only 18 months behind Brussels. “The terrorist networks are ready," he said. "Lots of people in the communities know about it, but are choosing to keep quiet and protect these young people."
Public pressure to discover any impending terrorist plots has mounted since the Brussels attacks, and in recent weeks many of the care workers have begun to complain that they’re being used as informants, betraying the trust of people in the communities where they live, without any kind of protection. “Of course there’s a tension. ‘Big Brother’ is watching you,” said Rasit Bal, a theologian who serves as a liaison between the Netherlands' mosques and the government. “The Muslim community is afraid of being monitored. We are suspicious.”
Street Coaches go out into the community.
Joris van Gennip for BuzzFeed News
They had been told to keep an eye out for the raven-haired young girl. At a daily briefing in mid-April, members of the Street Coaches — an outreach program financed by the Amsterdam city government — were informed that the girl, no more than 10 or 11 years old, had gone missing.
The girl, whose parents are from Morocco, was known for her violent outbursts against other kids and adults. She might just be a troubled kid acting out, or the visible tip of a larger problem: an abusive family, drugs, neglect. She had suddenly disappeared from the streets of Slotervaart, and the Street Coaches were concerned.
“You try to give everyone a number, a sticker with a color,” the team leader, Bonny Karangwa, said. “If you don’t see someone, you wonder where they went.”
After the briefing, two men, Mokhtar Boulaiz and Yasin Simsak, were dispatched to patrol Slotervaart on bicycles, the label Street Coaches emblazoned on their red jackets.
The Street Coaches are run by former police officer Jack van Midden and former Royal Dutch Marine Frits van den Heuvel van Varik; they serve as an auxiliary police force, cycling around some of Amsterdam’s more troubled neighborhoods. “The Street Coaches are in the vein of the society,” said Varik. “They speak the language of the streets.”
Social housing in the Netherlands tends to be better looked after
than in France or Belgium.
Joris van Gennip for BuzzFeed News
In Muslim neighborhoods, anger and alienation percolate among second- or third-generation descendants of immigrants, who feel divorced from their homelands yet not fully embraced by their new hosts. They mostly live in enclaves segregated from the mainstream of Dutch society, sprawling public housing complexes that lie beyond the city centers. Many feel they’re unfairly stigmatized and rejected for jobs or educational opportunities by bigoted “natives.”
Compared with their counterparts in France and Belgium, public housing districts like Slotervaart are relatively well looked after. Weeping willows grace the grassy embankments along the canals, and bike paths make their way through neighborhoods. Trash doesn’t pile up, and graffiti is minimal. New construction projects provide residents evidence that the state has not abandoned their enclaves. Small police stations dispatch local beat officers — often recruited from the Muslim community — to patrol the areas.
Out on the streets of Slotervaart, Boulaiz and Simsak suddenly spotted the girl. Boulaiz approached her carefully. “Hey, where have you been?” Boulaiz asked the girl. “Haven’t seen you around in a few days.”
She rolled her eyes. “I was in Belgium, visiting relatives.”
Later the two Street Coaches took notes, part of an attempt to identify networks and patterns within the Muslim community. “And did you see that jacket she was wearing?” Boulaiz asked.
“Yeah,” Simsak replied. “What’s a girl like that doing wearing a 500-euro jacket?”
Zaid el-Azzouti (left) chats with Marwan and Omer.
Joris Van Gennip for BuzzFeed News