When I ask Tom Flachett, founder of the Brussels Boxing Academy, how many of his former students have travelled to Syria to join Isis, he gets a little exasperated.



“They always ask the number,” he says, referring, I assume, to journalists. He picks up a book of pictures of academy alumni and points to someone in a group photo. “This guy is there now, he’s very young, you see?”

The main aim of Flachett’s club, set up in 2003, has always been to reach out to youngsters in some of Brussels’ poorest neighbourhoods, including Molenbeek, a small district in the north of Brussels. Boxing is a popular sport among this demographic, and it’s easy to organise and motivating for people with little else in their lives. Plus, having built up a relationship over years, many students turn to their trainers when they’re in trouble.

Radicalism is a problem that has been thrust upon the boxing club, and it doesn’t receive much funding to deal with it

Brussels has been in the spotlight as a hotbed for terrorism since the Paris and Brussels attacks in late 2015 and early 2016, which involved terrorists from Molenbeek. At least 47 people have left Molenbeek for Syria since 2011. In September of this year, the Brussels security services announced that it had deemed 57 residents of the district radicalised and put them under surveillance.

Healing rifts

Molenbeek is one of 19 municipalities in a city that has 19 mayors and six different police forces. These factions have a reputation for failing to collaborate. Belgium lacks a national framework for preventing radicalisation, so responsibility falls mostly on local authorities to draw up plans. But the approach of former Molenbeek mayor Philippe Moureaux, who presided over the district for 18 years until 2012, was laissez-faire, to say the least.

The European Institute of Peace conducted a survey this year in Molenbeek, which is home to a large Muslim community of predominantly Moroccan origin, and presented the findings to the current mayor, Françoise Schepmans, in September. Researchers interviewed more than 400 residents and found their main concerns to be a lack of jobs, poor levels of education, drug dealing and crumbling infrastructure. There is a growing rift between generations, as young people retaliate against the lack of opportunities.

Many boxing students turn to their trainers when they’re in trouble. Photograph: Sarah Dheedene

“It’s part of Brussels but it’s quite separate,” says Flachett. Segregation is something that preoccupies Flachett. A lot of sports clubs fail to recognise that certain practices – like the prevalence of alcohol, or nudity in changing rooms – can put off Muslims, while other clubs are made up of “exclusively 14- to 18-year-old Moroccan guys”, he says.

“In Brussels, that’s one of the things that is missing – the possibility to meet, to have contact with other people, with other religions, other origins, other languages, even girls with boys.”

Mixing young people from different backgrounds, Flachett believes, is a vital part of his job. “If you have young people who are completely excluded from society, it’s very easy to radicalise them,” he says.



Using sport to prevent ghettoisation

Inclusion is also a method used in Mechelen, a small city just north of Brussels that has been praised for its integration policies. About a fifth of its population is Muslim, but no-one has left for Syria. Its mayor, Bart Somers, encourages mixed sports clubs to prevent ghettoisation. Young members of one of the city’s football clubs have their report cards checked every month: if their marks aren’t good enough, they get a two-week ban from playing.

Schepmans has also been building links with sports clubs in her district. She recently announced that Molenbeek’s football club would be inviting young refugees from nearby asylum seeker reception centres to play with local teams a few times a week. It’s a model borrowed from Kraainem, a district east of Brussels that has been welcoming groups of five to 10 unaccompanied minors to play football, learn French and have a meal at its stadium since September 2015.

Kraainem is already very multicultural, the home team has 350 players from 42 different countries, so welcoming refugees is just the next step. The football club president Laurent Thieule explained that, on the pitch, wearing the same kit, the footballers are already integrated. “Football is a universal and easy language,” he said. “You put all these kids on a pitch and with 10 words they can communicate and they can play - with two legs and 10 words.”

Kraainem, a district east of Brussels has been welcoming young refugees to play football, learn French and have a meal at its stadium.

He invited me to watch a game, where I spoke to 16-year-old Nerion, who had been in Belgium about 10 days and was staying at the Woluwe Saint-Pierre reception centre. He left Albania because of family issues, and to escape a future of drugs and limited opportunities, and he said he wants to stay in Belgium for the rest of his life.

I asked him if he thinks he’ll be able to make friends playing football. “Of course,” he replied, “because you are not alone. It’s a sport you play with a team.”

Benjamin Renauld, a player in Kraainem’s first team who is also a volunteer coordinator the refugee initiative, says it is important for kids in the local community to meet refugees, and see them as real people. “When we started last year, it was really during the migration crisis,” he says. “There were many negative reactions, and we can make a positive story out of it.”



Tackling radicalism

Back in Molenbeek, Flachett says it’s identity that young people struggle with. They come to the gym with all sorts of questions, about where their parents come from, what they should be doing with their lives and what religion means to them. Flachett tries to get them thinking about their place in society in a positive way. Sometimes that means organising activities with local museums, theatre companies or even the police. Sometimes the trainers take groups of disaffected youngsters out of Brussels altogether, on walking trips to the Pyrenees, for example.

But radicalism is a problem that has been thrust upon the boxing club, and it doesn’t receive much funding to deal with it. Flachett and his colleagues study the subject in their own time. He has applied for funding to hire a trained social worker at the club, but he doesn’t think he’ll get it. The Brussels authorities, he thinks, prefer to invest in extra police and security cameras. Some 5,000 searches of homes and mosques have been conducted in the past six months.

Flachett’s work took on more poignancy when a former student who had struggled to find work in Brussels was found dead in Syria. “He was really a nice guy,” says Flachett. “We couldn’t explain it. The only thing that I know, he was really trying to do his best to be somebody in society.”

He shows me a picture of another of his former students, Ahmed Dahmani, who grew up in Molenbeek. In 2010, Dahmani had his boxing licence taken off him after he was caught smoking cannabis, and he stopped coming to the gym. In 2015, he was arrested in Turkeyon suspicion of helping to orchestrate the Paris attacks.

“It’s not only the licence they took -– they took his life. Boxing was his way to be somebody,” says Flachett. “And then, five years later, you hear something like that.”

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