Annual threat report warns of rising radicalisation among minors
.jpg)
18 per cent of the threat reports received by the Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis (CUTA) in 2024 involved minors. There is also "rapid radicalisation among minors", the organisation says in its annual report published on Thursday.
According to CUTA, the number of minors involved in plans for extremist or terrorist violence in Belgium appears to have increased in recent years. This phenomenon can also be observed abroad. For example, there have been several such attacks or plans for attacks in France, Sweden and Germany.
"Over the past three years, almost a third of the people who planned an attack in Belgium were under 18 years old," the report states. "If we look at the identified perpetrators of threat reports, minors also appear to be on the rise in 2024."
CUTA also sees an increase in the number of minors in the Joint Terrorism, Extremism, Radicalisation Process Database: last year, there were around 30 minors in the database. The findings are in line with what was already apparent at the end of May in the annual report of the federal public prosecutor's office: suspects in terrorist cases are increasingly young.
Online subcultures
Part of this trend appears to be driven by new and disturbing online subcultures. “A new phenomenon, in the US, but also in Europe and in Belgium, are groups that revolve around an extreme fascination with gratuitous violence. These are online groups with names such as No Lives Matter, for example, and 764, which refers to a postal code of the founder in the US," CUTA boss Gert Vercauteren said in an interview with De Morgen.
“They are situated within right-wing extremism, but the fascination with violence seems more important than the ideology," he said.
"They share videos with extremely gory images, sometimes even from IS, and incite each other to commit crimes. This can involved sexual exploitation, in which they encourage young girls to make sexually explicit images in order to blackmail them with them afterwards. Sometimes, it concerns minor crimes, with gamification: whoever commits certain acts rises in the pecking order.”
Geopolitical tensions
CUTA counted 287 threat reports last year, or 13 per cent less than in 2023. After investigation, it was found that 213 of the threats were related to extremism or terrorism.
The reports came from partner services such as the public prosecutor's office, the Cybersecurity Centre or radicalisation officials. 18 per cent of the authors of these threats are minors. In just over half of the threat reports, jihadist-Islamic extremism is the driving force.
One of the critical findings in 2024 for CUTA was the speed at which young people are radicalising. The strong online dimension to radicalisation was also noticeable.
The emotions caused by the violent conflict in the Middle East can be a trigger for jihadist terrorism, the report also said. Both al-Qaeda and IS regularly called for violence against Israeli and Jewish targets or their allies.
"In this context, the frustration and feeling of powerlessness among (mainly) young people of Islamic descent are factors that can create a climate in which the risk increases that certain individuals could resort to violence, also in the West itself," CUTA warns.
2024 was a year with two faces, Vercauteren says. "During the first half, we continued to see a high number of threat reports, largely a result of increased international tensions led by the war in Gaza. From June, we saw the situation gradually improve. The number of threat reports decreased, and threats against the Jewish and Israeli communities, which had increased sharply since October 2023, also decreased. However, the international context remained very volatile."
Since the attack in Brussels on 16 October 2023 in which two Swedish football fans were killed, the general threat level has been 3 (serious). This has remained unchanged in 2024.
© PHOTO EMMANUEL DUNAND
Related news
