BRUSSELS—This week’s trial of the only surviving assailant from the November 2015 Paris attacks has refocused attention on the Brussels district of Molenbeek where he grew up and was captured.
Salah Abdeslam’s trial for attempted murder is a painful reminder for the neighborhood of its role as the breeding ground of the terror cell that killed 130 people in those attacks and another 32 in Brussels in suicide bombings on March 22, 2016.
Molenbeek Mayor Françoise Schepmans, who has lived in the neighborhood for over 50 years, keeps the memory of those attacks alive, among other things with a monument to Brussels victims installed in front of the district’s opulent 19th-century town hall. “This is part of our history,” she said. “Molenbeek was a fertile ground for terrorism.”
Now she says her office is working to make it less so, both by stepping up policing and by promoting efforts to improve cultural and economic opportunities for Molenbeek’s residents.
Under the authority of zoning regulations, district authorities have launched periodic checks to ensure Molenbeek’s mosques aren’t fostering militant versions of Islam. Five of the neighborhood’s 25 mosques and Quranic schools have been shut down on those grounds over the past two years.
Law-enforcement efforts have also increased since 2016, with a doubling of surveillance cameras and a beefed-up police force. Molenbeek now has three rather than just one security official charged with keeping tabs on two-dozen families suspected of radicalism.
The neighborhood faces daunting economic challenges. Located just west of central Brussels, it is among the poorest of Belgium’s 589 districts, and its 27% unemployment rate in 2016—the latest year with available data—was more than triple the 7.8% national level. Youth unemployment was 38%, compared with 20% nationally, and youth workers say a third of local students are two or more years behind in school.
Molenbeek’s predominantly Moroccan migrant community has long formed a largely closed culture, officials say, complicating efforts to better integrate the neighborhood into the larger economy and to monitor radicalized residents. “We live here like at home; this is like Morocco,” a young woman wearing a head scarf said as she crossed Molenbeek’s main square with a friend on Tuesday.
Some opening up has occurred in the last two years. A computer-coding center called MolenGeek, sponsored in part by Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. is starting to provide training and job prospects for young people. Ibrahim Ouassari, a self-taught coder who dropped out of school at 13, helped start the tech-talent incubator with weekend coding events. Since the Paris and Brussels attacks it has taken off, developing into a co-working space and coding school open all week for 18- to 25-year-olds.
Some 600 people have passed through MolenGeek over the past two years to learn coding or develop apps and websites, with Google and Samsung providing funding for so-called hackathons, coaching sessions and equipment. Of the first batch of 16 coders that graduated last year, only two aren’t working, according to co-founder Julie Foulon.
Sumaya Lamjahdi and Amelia Yulheri, both in their 20s, now use MolenGeek as an office for their own webdesign business. “It’s a very friendly environment,” said Ms. Yulheri, who wears a head scarf. “We always get help when we need it.”
In a neighborhood where young people often live with their large families in small flats, MolenGeek is a welcome refuge—“as long as you leave all your problems and victimization at the door,” Mr. Ouassari said. “Here it’s about tech.”
Efforts to bridge Molenbeek’s social rifts are also under way. With the help of town hall, the cultural cafe Brass’Art opened last March—on the first anniversary of the Brussels attacks—on the ground floor of the building where Mr. Abdeslam once lived.
“We serve tea and coffee—but also wine and beer,” said Majda Aschab, a 32-year-old volunteer at the cafe. “We organize exhibitions, concerts. Just the other day we had two buses from Molenbeek travel to Paris to see a theater play with two Belgian actors.”
For all that, she said, some Muslim families are moving out of Molenbeek to escape its stigma, even as more prosperous Belgians are moving back to parts of the neighborhood. Denis Dalmans, a 26-year-old who was born and grew up in Molenbeek, returned three months ago to work at a public-relations firm there.
“There is a lot going on—associations, startups, cafes. The image of Molenbeek is really improving,” he said.
Ms. Schepmans, the mayor, puts that change in perspective. “Things are moving, but the poverty is still very present,” she said. “Big families crammed in small apartments—that’s still Molenbeek.”
There is some evidence the threat of terrorism is lessening. Belgium last month lowered its nationwide terror alert to 2 on a scale of 1 to 4 for the first time since 2015, citing the dismantling of Islamic State in Syria. According to Petra Thijs, a spokeswoman for Belgium’s Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis, 413 Belgian foreign fighters left for Syria and Iraq in 2015 and 2016; Ms. Schepmans’s office said 47 of them were from Molenbeek. One-third of that total are believed dead, one-third still in the region and one-third returned.
In 2017, Ms. Thijs said, virtually no fighters are thought to have headed out from Belgium, and only four women and one man returned. But a new category of homegrown terrorists, now containing 33 suspects, has been added, she said.
“There is no zero risk,” Ms. Schepmans said. In July a man from Molenbeek was shot dead by patrolling soldiers after trying to detonate a homemade bomb at Brussels Central Station.
Write to Valentina Pop at valentina.pop@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications Photo captions in earlier versions of this article misspelled Majda Aschab and Denis Dalmans’s names as Majda Aschael and Denis Dalman. (Feb. 8, 2018)
