For over five months, Samira has been waiting. Waiting for her daughter, Nora, to come home from…

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http://www.euronews.com/2013/10/18/family-fears-for-belgium-s-foreign-fighters-in-syria
For over five months, Samira has been waiting. Waiting for her daughter, Nora, to come home from Syria to Brussels. Samira is Belgian. This divorced mother of four said she had no idea her daughter wanted to leave: “A normal girl. She took some religion classes. She did her prayers. She was a completely normal girl, she had her friends. I didn’t notice anything and I think all the parents were the same because they led a normal life.”

And although her daughter became progressively more religious, Samira said there were no warning signs. Shortly after her 18th birthday, Nora quit school:
“She had just turned eighteen and I said, listen, you need a diploma, it’s your last year of school. But she said no, I don’t feel right, I want to quit school. I’ll go sign up at the employment agency. I want to do something being able to wear my headscarf. I said, alright, okay, as long as we have food in the house. And she quit school and she started taking more religion courses to deepen her faith. And after several months, she left.”

Nora left in May and in Syria married a fellow Belgian from her hometown. Her husband was killed less than a month later. But Nora has not come home.

Nora is one of the estimated 300 young Belgian Muslims who went to Syria to help. And they’re not alone: from Sweden to France to the UK or Denmark, there are some 2000 young European Muslims helping or fighting in a war European governments warn is not theirs to fight.

And now there is a growing concern that the real threat is when these so-called foreign fighters come home. That having been radicalised in Syria alongside al-Qaeda rebels, they will export this radicalisation back onto European soil.

Dimitri Bontinck went to Syria to find his 18-year-old son, Jejoen, but he came back alone.

He has written a book about him, called “Syrian warrior against his will”.

Bontinck says Jejoen went to Jesuit schools and neither he nor his ex-wife, Jejoen’s mother were religious.

At the age of 15, he converted to Islam after falling in love with a Muslim girl. He was still a minor when he left for Syria.

Bontinck says to call his son or other young Belgians a European security threat is ridiculous. He blames the Belgian government for not banning radical groups:
” I have been in Syria. Am I radicalised? No. Am I traumatised? No. All these journalists from the world press who are going to Syria when they come back from Syria are they traumatised? No. Where is the proof that they are fighters? Who says they are not youngsters working as volunteers in a clinic? Or a medical point? They (the government) failed because they don’t have laws, they don’t make it forbidden that radical organisations are active here in this country. This is the truth. Nobody of these politicians, they ask the reason why youngsters are going to Syria? This is the point. Why? Why they are going there?”

This question has been part of a national soul-searching over the past six months. A soul-searching which has intensified since the number of young Belgians killed in Syria has increased. And also a national awakening when, per capita, Belgium is the European country which has seen the largest number of foreign fighters go to Syria.

But for Joëlle Milquet Belgium’s interior minister who created a task force to tackle this problem, criticism of government inertia is unfair:
“Not doing enough? I think we’re doing the maximum. I think that at a European level, we’ve even become a point of reference regarding everything we’ve put in place. We’ve set up a whole strategy of fighting and preventing radicalism. We’ve strengthened our services, added more means. We have a thorough follow-up. But of course you can never prevent a young person from leaving his parents. We can’t put a police officer at each door.”

Every Saturday Jean-Louis Denis collects food to distribute to the poor and homeless.

A Muslim convert, Jean-Louis says its his spiritual duty to fight an unjust system of capitalism and democracy.

He is an ex-member of Sharia4Belgium which was allegedly dissolved after its leader was sentenced to prison for enticement to hatred. The group has also been accused of recruiting young Belgian Muslims for Syria.

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