BRUSSELS
— The announcement on Sunday that the plotters of last month’s Brussels
terror attacks had originally intended to hit Paris again only
heightened the concern among police and intelligence agencies that
shadowy Islamic State networks could unleash new attacks at any time,
not only in France and Belgium but in other European capitals.
As
intelligence experts and officials took stock of what they have learned
since the Nov. 13 assaults in and around Paris, which killed 130
people, several things have come into focus. The scale of the Islamic
State’s operations in Europe are still not known, but they appear to be
larger and more layered than investigators at first realized; if the
Paris and Brussels attacks are any model, the plotters will rely on
local criminal networks in addition to committed extremists.
Even
as the United States, its allies and Russia have killed leaders of the
Islamic State, and have rolled back some of the extremist organization’s
gains on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State appears
to be posing a largely hidden and lethal threat across much of Europe.
When
Belgian prosecutors announced that Mohamed Abrini, one of the men
arrested on Friday, had confessed to being the mysterious third man in
the Brussels Airport bombing, it seemed to mark a rare victory for
Belgian law enforcement, which has struggled to track down extremists.
But it also was a reminder of the ease with which the Islamic State’s
operatives move across borders and the shifting roles that suspects
play: According to prosecutors, Mr. Abrini was a logistician in the Paris attacks but was meant to be a bomber in the Brussels attack — except that his bomb failed to explode.
There
are almost certainly similar cells that are active in
non-French-speaking countries and that have not yet surfaced. Britain,
Germany and Italy are thought to be high on the list of Islamic State
targets.
It
adds up to a long road ahead in Europe for law enforcement and
intelligence agencies but also for citizens who are having to learn to
adapt to an array of new security precautions and more intrusive
surveillance, especially in public places.
“We
are not finished yet with the job of finding everyone who is in this
big network of Paris and Brussels,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, the head
of the French Center for the Analysis of Terrorism in Paris. “Every time
progress is made, we add another few people to the list of people we
are looking for.”
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It
is sobering to look at the number of people believed to have some
connection to the Paris and Brussels attacks: 36 are suspected of being
active participants to varying degrees in organizing or carrying them
out. Of those, 13 are dead, and most of the rest are in custody. A
handful have been released but are subject to conditions, like daily
check-ins at a police station.
Others
are probably lying low or on the run. What worries investigators is
that many of the participants in the Paris-Brussels network were
recruited by a preacher in the Brussels district of Molenbeek, Khalid
Zerkani. He was tried twice in Belgium, accused of recruiting more than
50 young men to join the fight in Syria and helping to finance their
journey to the Middle East. Many of those recruits were also named in
those trials and tried in absentia.
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