Perspective:

Islamic State operatives and sympathizers deploy guerilla warfare beyond the borders of Iraq and Syria. The military in Belgium deploys on the streets.

Amaq Agency for ISIS Say that ISIS claim responsibility for Brussels attacks.

  From airport security camera.

The known suicide bombers in Brussels above.

Brussels terror attacks: David Cameron calls emergency Cobra meeting to determine UK response to explosions

At Least 31 Dead in Brussels Terror Attacks; Belgium Raises Terror Alert to Highest Level

Allowing 77 million Turks on a Visa Free with porous Syria borders makes Brexit an imperatice for  National Security measures in Brussels and all corners in Europe. Further, the United States has a 37 country visa free waiver system including most countries in Europe.

Even the United Nations has a dispatch explaining the concerns.

Nearly 600 EU personnel are deployed to train Mali’s security forces. Their headquarters in Bamako came under attack. “Gunmen on Monday attacked a hotel in Mali’s capital, Bamako, that had been converted into the headquarters of a European Union military training operation, but there no casualties among the mission’s personnel. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which began at around 6:30 p.m. local time (1830 GMT), but Mali and neighboring West African countries have increasingly been the target of Islamist militants, some of them affiliated with al Qaeda. One of the assailants was killed and two suspects were arrested and were being interrogated, the country’s internal security minister said. A witness said the attack targeted Bamako’s Nord-Sud Hotel, headquarters for the mission of nearly 600 EU personnel deployed to Mali to train its security forces.” (Reuters http://reut.rs/1Se6q9i)

A Landmark ICC Ruling…”War crimes judges Monday found former Congolese vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba guilty of a deliberate campaign of widespread rapes and killings by his private army in Central African Republic over a decade ago. In a landmark verdict, the judges from the International Criminal Court (ICC) found Bemba guilty on five charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, saying he had retained “effective command and control” over the forces sent in to CAR to quell an attempted coup against the then president. It was the first case before the ICC to focus on sexual violence as a weapon of war, as well as to find a military commander to blame for the atrocities carried out by his forces even though he did not order them.” (AFP http://yhoo.it/1pFCNoj)

EU deal not slowing down migrant flow…More than 1,600 migrants have landed in Greece since a landmark EU-Turkish deal on curbing the influx took effect, officials said Monday, highlighting the challenges still facing efforts to tackle the crisis. (AFP http://yhoo.it/1LBveZn) And Greece made an appeal for help dealing with migrant influx. (Reuters http://yhoo.it/1LBvbwG)

*** Because of the European coalition and that of the United States taking more aggressive actions in Mosul in recent weeks and other targets in Iraq, the jihadis are watching this carefully and responding by attacks such as that at the Brussels airport and on the Metro system.

Brussels Terror Attacks Bring Guerrilla War to the Heart of Europe

Coordinated attacks on Brussels this morning may signal the start of an ISIS-led guerrilla warfare campaign in the West.

DailyBeast: PARIS — As explosions rocked the airport and the metro in Brussels this morning, fears grew that the threat of terrorism is morphing into the threat of guerrilla war in Europe.

The attacks, which killed more than 20 people, came four days after the arrest in Brussels of Salah Abdeslam, a member of the terrorist cell that attacked Paris cafés, a sports stadium, and a concert hall in November, slaughtering 130 people. On Sunday, the Belgian foreign minister warned that Abdeslam was planning a new attack.

Emmanuel Dunand/Getty

  

  

 

Some reports suggest that this attack, clearly coordinated in the style of the Paris carnage, was what was in the works, and went ahead without Abdeslam. It was known that at least two of his associates were still on the run.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said it was clear Europe was no longer simply the victim of a series of isolated terror attacks. “We have been subjected for the last few months in Europe to acts of war,” he said. “We are at war.”

As French scholar Gilles Kepel has pointed out, the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, which carried out the Paris attacks and which presumably was involved in today’s bombings, is following a playbook written more than a decade ago: The Call for an International Islamic Resistance by Abu Musab al Suri, a Syrian jihadist.

Suri knew Europe well. He had lived for a while in Britain, in the community of Arab and Muslim exiles there. His core idea was that Muslims in the West, though increasingly numerous, felt themselves isolated and under pressure, and this could be exploited to create a breakdown of society, develop insurgency, and launch a civil war where the forces of Islam eventually would be victorious.

Acts of terror, dubbed “resistance,” would heighten the already existing “Islamophobia,” and “exacerbate the contradictions,” as communist revolutionaries used to say, until hatred and suspicion ran high and integration became impossible.

Since the Nov. 13 atrocity, that process has been taking shape, with increased resentment and fear linked to the coincidental mass influx of refugees from the Middle East. Indeed, the impact of these atrocities has reached the United States political scene and has been exploited extensively by presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Today’s attack began near the check-in desks at Brussels Airport. Two explosions in the departure hall killed at least 13 people and injured more than 30 others. The public prosecutor in Brussels has confirmed that one of those two blasts was detonated by a suicide bomber.

Video footage from the scene showed chaos as survivors scrambled to safety. Zach Mouzoun, who had just arrived at the airport on a flight, told local television that the second explosion cracked pipes, mixing water with victims’ blood as the ceiling fell in. “It was atrocious. The ceilings collapsed,” he said. “There was blood everywhere, injured people, bags everywhere.”

“We were walking in the debris. It was a war scene,” he said.

Soon after, a bomb blast interrupted the morning commute at Maalbeek metro station, which is close to the headquarters of the European Union and NATO. Belgian subway officials said 15 people were killed and another 55 injured in the subterranean attack.

Brussels shut down public access to its entire rail and air transport networks and raised the terror threat level to its highest. “What we feared has happened, we were hit by blind attacks,” said the Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel.

Multiple U.S. and European officials in Brussels last weekend said they had been warned by their security and intelligence teams of the possibility of a follow-on attack in retaliation for the arrest of Paris attack fugitive Salah Abdesalam.

Officials were in town for the German Marshall Fund’s Brussels forum where Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said they’d discovered Abdesalam had stockpiled weapons and built a new network to launch potential violence, news that chilled the already tense city even as officials there celebrated capturing the terror suspect alive after a four-month manhunt.

“He was ready to start something from Brussels,” Reynders told officials and diplomats on Sunday.

“We found a lot of weapons, heavy weapons in the first investigations, and we have seen a new network of people around him in Brussels,” the minister said, adding that they’d been searching for 10 people, but found more than 30 people connected to the Paris attacks.

While there had been security throughout the city, both visible police and military presence, a Daily Beast reporter noticed little or no security at the main terminal of the airport yesterday morning.

Whether or not it was directly linked to Abdesalam’s arrest, U.S. intelligence officials said that early signs pointed to ISIS as being the likely culprit of the attacks.

The bombings “bear all the hallmarks of an ISIS-inspired, or ISIS-coordinated, attack,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “Europe is facing a real threat from the thousands who have traveled abroad to Syria and Iraq to train with ISIS, and have returned home. It is enormously difficult to track all of them, or defend soft targets like those attacked in Brussels and previously in Paris,” Schiff said.

A senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking on background, said that “the intelligence community continues to assess the situation in Brussels and is staying in close contact with our Belgian and European partners.”

Bombs at the Brussels airport were apparently set off in the departures terminal prior to security screening. Marsha Catron, the spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department, which oversees airport security in the U.S., said the department “will not hesitate to adjust our security posture, as appropriate, to protect the American people.” Catron said that the department “is closely monitoring the unfolding events in Brussels and we remain in contact with our counterparts in the region.”