
Take a short westerly stroll from the centre of Brussels, with its art nouveau houses and majestic squares, and you reach a canal, beyond which lies a less handsome quarter of the Belgian capital.

During the Industrial Revolution it was known as ‘Little Manchester’, by dint of the many thriving factories and warehouses that sprang up beside the newly-built waterway.

Today, ‘Little Morocco’ would be a more appropriate soubriquet. For crossing the bridge into Molenbeek — as it is called — you feel as though you have abruptly exited Europe and entered some seething Middle Eastern or North African ghetto.

Guns drawn, Belgian special forces prepare to enter through an attic window as they carry out a raid after the deadly attacks in Paris

The artisans and entrepreneurs who made this such a prosperous district — devoutly Roman Catholic Walloons and God-fearing Protestant Flemings — moved long ago.

Their handsome, four-storey houses are now divided into tenements, cheaply rented to the so-called ‘New Belgians’ who make up the great majority of the area’s 100,000 population — predominantly second and third-generation Moroccans and Turks.

Towering above these terraces, there is a ring of grim, prematurely dilapidated high-rise blocks whose flats have been handed out to more recently arrived immigrants, including a good many refugees and asylum seekers subsisting on welfare hand-outs.

Since the great majority of Molenbeek’s 100,000 residents are Muslims, there are 22 mosques here, of varying size and reputation, so that five times a day the streets echo to the muezzin’s wailing call to prayer.

Many shop signs are in Arabic; the butchers are almost exclusively halal; there is a bustling, souk-style open market; full-face veils are worn as routinely as in Tangier and Istanbul. When a woman in a burka was arrested, local youths attacked the police station.

By and large, however, I was greeted in a pleasant manner yesterday, even though tensions were running high amid a huge police manhunt for the men behind the massacre in Paris, just 90 minutes away by train.

Belgian special operations forces, clad in balaclavas and with bomb disposal robots at the ready, cordoned off two streets and told residents to stay in their homes as they raided a flat in the area, belonging to the family of key Paris suspect Salah Abdeslam.

Special intervention forces sit on top of a roof as they prepare to enter a house in Brussels on Monday amid a manhunt for a suspect of the Paris attacks

Heavily armed special forces stand guard outside a house being searched in the Rue Delaunoy after the attacks killed 129 people

Belgian special operations forces, clad in balaclavas and with bomb disposal robots at the ready, cordoned off two streets and told residents to stay in their homes

Police were raiding a flat in the area belonging to the family of key Paris suspect Salah Abdeslam, one of three brothers involved in the attacks

Shots and explosions could be heard as special forces officers clambered over rooftops.

While the dramatic developments were going on, I ventured off the beaten path to be met with hostile glares from huddles of brooding young Belgian-Arab men and boys.

Indeed, my taxi driver, Abdullah Kassimi, of Moroccan heritage, thought long and hard before agreeing to take me to Molenbeek, though he lived there for four years before escaping to the more affluent Anderlecht.

‘It just isn’t a place where outsiders are very welcome among some people,’ he shrugged, when I asked him why.

It comes as little surprise, then, that this is the suburb believed to have spawned the evil architects of the Paris atrocities, including its supposed mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud (who lived in one of the more affluent neighbourhoods, close to the canal, before stealing away to become a jihadi in Syria).

What is surprising — truly shocking, in fact — is the sheer number of dangerous fanatics to have emerged from this obscure enclave.

It has gained such an appalling reputation for radicalising and sustaining Islamic fanatics that it is regarded, among politicians, the intelligence services and academics alike, as the cradle of European terrorism.

The deputy mayor of Molenbeek, Ahmed El Khannoussi, insists the area has been unfairly ‘stigmatised’ by the terrorist attacks and says: ‘It is extremely dangerous to link these radicals with the local population.’

Police officers stand guard as press gather at the scene of a bomb alert at the Rue des Deux Eglises in Brussels on Monday

A police officer on the scene during a bomb alert. There is heavy police presence in areas across Europe following the attacks on Paris on Friday

The house (left) of the parents of Mohamed Abdeslam (right), who categorically denied he had anything to do with Friday's attacks

Authorities in Belgium made several arrests in the Brussels area of Molenbeek in a series of raids on Saturday morning

However, leaving aside the fugitive Abaaoud, who spirited away his 13-year-old brother to join ISIS with him, the statistics are deeply alarming.

From the assassination of an anti-Taliban leader in Afghanistan to the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the onslaught last year on the Jewish museum in Brussels, and the attempted murders on a Paris to Amsterdam train last summer... the trail invariably leads back to Molenbeek.

Yet it does not stop there. According to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, Belgium is, per capita, Europe’s biggest source of jihadi fighters in Syria and Iraq, supplying about 40 for every million inhabitants — twice the ratio in France and four times that in the UK.

Pieter van Ostaeyen, an expert on jihad, says there were about 190 Belgian fighters in Syria last month, the majority with ISIS, including 47 women. More worrying still, he says, a further 120 have returned to the Lowlands; who knows with what malevolent intent?

The Belgian Interior Ministry appears to put the figure even higher, gauging that 270 of their nationals are embedded with the Islamic State. But whatever the precise number, everyone agrees that many of them will have been turned into murderous fanatics in ‘Little Manchester’.

‘Almost every time (an Islamic terrorist atrocity occurs) there is a link with Molenbeek,’ Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel admitted at the weekend.

‘We have tried prevention. Now we will have to get repressive. It has been a form of laissez faire and laxity. Now we are paying the bill.’

No one doubts it. One expert who has studied Molenbeek closely says it not only trains young people for terror but also serves as their operational base, centre of ‘ideological inspiration’ and arsenal. ‘With 500 to 1,000 euros (£350-£700) you can get a military weapon there in half an hour,’ he asserts.

The gunmen burst into the Bataclan concert hall shouting 'Allahu Akbar', 'God is great'. Pictured: A victim under a blanket outside the theatre after the massacre

Three terrorists blew up their suicide vests when police raided the Bataclan hall to save hostages trapped inside. Above, a victim covered in blood walks near the theatre

Victims of the shooting attack lay on the pavement outside La Bell Equipe restaurant on Friday evening after 129 people were slaughtered by ISIS gunmen

French fire officer helped an injured man away from the scene of the attack at the Bataclan concert in Paris on Friday night

Eight militants, all wearing suicide vests, brought unprecedented violence to the streets of the French capital in the bloodiest attack in Europe since the Madrid train bombings in 2004

Supporters of both France and Germany were held in the stadium until they could be safely evacuated after explosions were heard outside the stadium

All this begs one obvious question: why Molenbeek? What sets it apart from many other European towns and cities with large but peaceable Muslim populations: the original Manchester, for example? And even Paris, with its troubled immigrant sink estates?

My taxi driver, Mr Kassimi, whose disgust at the Paris attacks was plain to see, offered a fascinating personal perspective.

Like many Moroccans, he said, his forbears had been encouraged to emigrate to Belgium some 50 years ago to help rebuild the country after the war. His grandfather and father had worked as coalminers, saving to provide him with a good education. He had earned a geology degree. However, he claimed, his hopes of forging a professional career had been dashed by the discrimination that persists in Belgian society. So, at 45, with two young children to support, he was forced to earn his living as a cabbie.

He had learned to come to terms with his lot, he insisted. But many younger Belgians from Muslim immigrant stock had not. They felt ‘marginalised’, angry, alienated. When they visited family in Morocco, they were called ‘tourists’; but many white Belgians regarded them as foreigners, too.

In Molenbeek, where 40 per cent of the residents are unemployed, this had caused serious social problems. ‘The young people either turn to crime and drugs, or they become radicalised,’ he said.

A mourner pays his respects outside the Le Carillon restaurant, the site of one of the attacks, on Saturday following Friday's horror

Residents of Paris, which is currently in three days of national mourning, embrace each other as they pause to remember the victims outside Le Petit Cambodge in the 10th district of Paris on Sunday

Candles lit up the darkness at the Place de la Republique on Sunday night as Parisians defied a five-day ban on public demonstrations

‘In fact, they often do both. First they smoke — and sell — hashish; and then they get disillusioned and go to the other extreme.’

When this happened, he said, there were all too many hardened terrorists waiting to ‘brainwash’ them. Not in the mosques, he said, for most imams tried to teach young people true Muslim values. The evil cradling was conducted with stealth, in apartments and cafes, and even at the school gates.

Some people blame Belgium’s so-called ‘divide and don’t rule’ system of government, which splits power among dozens of parties and factions, so that — despite repeated promises to broach the huge problems in areas such as Molenbeek — responsibility falls through the net.

In Brussels, for example, there are six police forces — not renowned for their co-operation — and 19 regional mayors, several of whom rely on the large Muslim vote.

Then there is the malign influence of a shadowy group called Sharia4Belgium, set up in 2010, ostensibly to lobby for a ‘Koran state’, but which has recently concentrated its efforts on persuading disaffected youths to fight in Syria, with Molenbeek its main recruiting ground.

Some Belgian politicians also claim that radical clerics who came from Saudi Arabia in the 1970s began to adversely influence Belgium’s mainly Moroccan Muslims.

Whatever the truth, something must be done about Molenbeek. And quickly.

Right-wing Interior Minister Jan Jambon outraged liberals recently by mooting the idea of forcing refugees to wear identification tags.