Brussels, Nice: ISIS strikes in Europe

Zaventem Airport, March 22, 2016: two explosions devastate the departures area

Brussels, Nice: ISIS strikes in Europe. Attack on Europe

Brussels, Zaventem Airport, March 22, 2016, 7:58 a.m. Ibrahim el-Bakraoui and Najim Laachraoui push luggage carts toward the check-in counters. The bags contain nail bombs. Two explosions, just seconds apart, devastate the departures area, immediately killing 16 people and injuring 80. The third attacker, Mohamed Abrini, captured on camera with a hat pulled down over his head, abandons the unexploded luggage and flees the airport on foot.

73 minutes later, at 9:11 a.m., a subway train that had just departed from Maelbeek station, in the heart of the European institutions district, a few hundred meters from the Parliament and the Commission, is torn apart by a third explosion. Khalid el-Bakraoui, Ibrahim’s brother, blows himself up in the second car. Another 16 dead.

32 victims in total. The worst attack in Belgium’s post-war history. The attackers were part of the same network that had struck Paris four months earlier; they had grown up in Molenbeek, trained in Syria, and were protected by the same accomplices. A few days earlier, the police had arrested Salah Abdeslam, the sole survivor of the Paris cell.

Nice, Promenade des Anglais, July 14, 2016, 10:34 p.m. The fireworks for the national holiday had just ended. Thirty thousand people were crowding the promenade. At 10:34 p.m., Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian resident of Nice and truck driver who was already on probation for domestic violence, stepped on the gas of a 19-ton Renault Midlum truck and plowed into the people walking on the sidewalks.

The truck traveled along the promenade at 90 kilometers per hour for over two kilometers, zigzagging to strike as many people as possible. At the same time, Bouhlel fired shots from the window. The terrorist attack left 80 dead, including 15 minors, and 458 injured.

The Tunisian terrorist was then shot dead by police while the truck was still moving.

Bouhlel was not a trained militant, nor had he attended a mosque before then. He had grown a beard just eight days before the attack, after being indoctrinated, according to an uncle’s account, in a couple of weeks by a local ISIS member. He was not the product of years of recruitment like the Brussels terrorists. He was the product of weeks. And of a rented truck.

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