Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon | EPA/JULIEN WARNAND Europe’s terror weak spot Belgium’s interior minister expresses concern about security in Brussels.

Belgium has a local terrorism problem.

Local, national and international authorities at POLITICO’s What Works event Tuesday night all agreed on that.

What they disagreed on — and what makes the problem pervasive — is how to solve it.

Significantly more fighters joined Sunni militant organizations in Syria and Iraq from Belgium than any other country in the EU, according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation.

Deputy Prime Minister Jan Jambon, who also serves as the interior minister in the Belgian government, said that 400 people have left the country to join ISIL to date, with a clear majority of Belgian recruits coming from Brussels.

He said the country had gotten a better grip on extremism in most Belgian cities, but said the exception was Brussels. The country's capital is "too divided” between national and regional authorities, he said, complicating the counterterrorism efforts here.

"Brussels is a relatively small city, 1.2 million," Jambon said. "And yet we have six police departments. Nineteen different municipalities. New York is a city of 11 million. How many police departments do they have? One.”

Jambon said what worries him most in the counterterrorism fight in Belgium is "lone wolves."

“Terrorists know no borders. We have to work country to country.” — Jan Jambon.

“We are organized for the moment to detect and fight people in the network of IS,” he said. “What keeps me up at night is the guy who sits behind his computer searching the messages of IS and of the hate preachers.”

Jambon said that while lone wolves don’t have the capacity to destabilize society, they can still do harm to the community.

For example, he said that the thwarted attack on Verviers in January was not, as previously thought, a large-scale planned attack on a police station. The three terrorists planned to kidnap a single police officer in uniform and kill him on a webcam, Jambon said.

“They were just killing one man,” Jambon said. “But for people, who are protected by police officers, that symbol, I think, would provoke panic not only in Belgium but in all of Europe.”

Two of the three potential terrorists — who Jambon said had spent time in Syria and were reporting to a handler in Greece — were killed in the attack. One is still in prison.

The detection and prevention of the Verviers plot was proof that Belgian counterterrorism is improving. But it’s hard to counter the skilled online recruitment of ISIL, whom Jambon said sends 100,000 Twitter messages a day to potential recruits. Another avenue for recruitment is Playstation 4, whose users can connect in ways that are hard for authorities to detect. Jambon said Playstation 4 is even more difficult to monitor than WhatsApp and other applications.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to preventing extremist recruits. The first is retroactive — stopping recruits en route to Syria and other countries, or investing in counterterrorism police units like the one that stopped the January attack in Verviers.

The second is preventative — reaching out to potential recruits before they’ve become immersed in extremist ideology.

The first method is difficult in a Continent as de-federalized as Europe. As Tibor Navracsics, the European commissioner for education, culture, youth and sport, pointed out to the panel Tuesday, Europe has 28 national systems and some (like Belgium) are even further divided into regional authorities.

Jambon said that when the Charlie Hebdo attack took place in January, only four countries were exchanging information about terrorism suspects. Although countries have improved their exchange of information, there is still a debate among Europeans about security and privacy. Without an overarching police force or an essentially carte blanche monitoring decree similar to the U.S.'s Patriot Act, it’s difficult to police 28 countries.

“Terrorists know no borders,” Jambon said. “We have to work country to country.”

So, according to Navracsics, Europe is focusing on the “preventative” measure — how to prevent recruits before they’re attracted by ISIS’s message.

But even among panelists, there was disagreement over who should be targeted (where is the line between racial profiling and reaching out to marginalized communities?), how they should be targeted (ISIL does most of its recruiting online. Should Europe respond with a digital counternarrative or does it need more tailored messages?), and whose responsibility they are (national governments have more resources, but local municipalities have a better feel for their communities).

Abdi Warsame, a Minneapolis City Council member who has faced “comparable” extremist threats in his Minnesota community, said local and federal governments need to work together in order to emphasize the dangers for recruits.

“It doesn’t take a lot of money to highlight that 95 percent of the people in my community who have gone to fight have been killed,” Warsame said.

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