According to the Moroccan press, the aim of the meeting was to discuss the “need to expand areas of bilateral cooperation between the security agencies of the two countries, with the aim of facilitating the exchange of intelligence and sharing of experiences in the field of security”. On the agenda: the security situation in the Sahel where terrorist groups have been sowing chaos for many years.
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While it is easy to understand how this worries neighboring Morocco, it is more difficult to understand how this could have an impact on Belgium.
Yet, The Free has learned from good sources that the fate of the Sahel is indeed arousing the interest of the Belgian intelligence services – even if Francisca Bostyn’s visit was not solely linked to this issue.
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The Sahel and the “Foreign Fighters”
This 48-hour trip by Francisca Bostyn to Rabat is firstly a continuation of a first visit organized, in November 2023, in the company of the man who had just been appointed Minister of Justice in Belgium, Paul Van Tigchelt (Open VLD).
The liberal went to Morocco in particular to discuss the thorny issue of the transfer of detainees from Belgium to Morocco. For the Belgian and Moroccan heads of the Sûreté, it was more of a courtesy visit.
Francisca Bostyn’s trip is in the same vein, this time with a few more specific points on the agenda. Among them, therefore, the situation in the Sahel, relegated to second place in the news, far behind the war between Ukraine and Russia and that in the Middle East.
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However, the Sahel is a real powder keg where, both Al Qaeda and Daesh sympathizers are very active. From good sources, we learn that the fear of the Belgian authorities is to see the Sahel become what Syria and Iraq were at one point: a terrorist threat for Europe. Hence his interest in the question. If the threat is neither serious nor imminent, attention is still required, we learned.
The Free learned that the other point on the agenda concerned the sharing and exchange of information more generally on jihadist networks and their possible links with European countries. As a reminder, a significant number of Foreign Fighters (or foreign fighters, Editor’s note) who left to join the ranks of Daesh from Belgium were originally from Morocco. It is therefore fundamental for Belgium to have access to information that could be collected by the Moroccan authorities, whose raids on terrorist circles are frequent.
