Belgium's New Visigoths: How Narco-Politics Displaced Islamism in Brussels

An Ethnography of Brussels

Brussels can be aptly described as an aggregate of several ethnic communes constituting one civic whole. When Micheál Martin’s motorcade slips from Zaventem Airport to the EU Council building each month, the Taoiseach passes areas reshaped by the flow of migration, gentrification, and Belgian social democracy.

In the extreme north sits the so-called “Vlaamse Rand,” or Flemish Ring, making up the last linguistic remnants of the Dutch-speaking majority. Once populated almost exclusively by Flemish speakers, deindustrialisation, Wallonian hegemony, and social engineering through the asylum system chipped away at Flemish Brussels.

Further south lie the Moroccan ghettos of Molenbeek and Schaerbeek. These communities originated in the chain migration from the Rif region, brought about by labour agreements signed in the 1960s as unionised Italian workers shifted away from Belgium following various mining disasters.

A hotbed of Islamism, the area is now experiencing a wave of narco-violence and Islamo-gauchism, manifested through local strongmen and co-opted branches of the Marxist PTB party.

Moving further south, you encounter the Turkish-dominated Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, under the thumb of Erdogan-adjacent hybrid networks headed by rogue socialist mayor Emir Kir and the Ankara-funded Diyanet network of mosques.

Building his base in opposition to the expansion of the local red-light district, Kir’s administration came into question over allegations of vote rigging, the mobilisation of the police against opponents, and the commune running a remarkable fiscal deficit, even by Belgian standards. Grey Wolves insignia are commonplace, with the commune witnessing occasional clashes between masked Turkish and Kurdish hoodlums.

Heading south again, you meet the so-called ‘Brussels bubble’ for EU officials and the tourist district, both providing a market for the city’s drug peddlers. Within the mix, you find small enclaves of Congolese (often the African nation’s elite squirrelling away funds) in Matongé, as well as a sprinkling of Bulgarian, Albanian, and Latin American districts, and squats of recent migrants from the Sahel.

The city terminates at the Wallonian suburbs in the extreme south.

Without the animosity of a French banlieue, thanks to a lack of colonial history, the multicultural doctrine of the Belgian state is one of compromise and civic pragmatism. Belgium operates a dysfunctional Bismarckian welfare state for each constituent pillar of society—Christians, Flemish, and socialists—each with its own funding streams.

This patronage system stitches over the lack of a national core, even presenting itself as an avenue for onboarding and assimilating Islamic arrivals.

The 2016 bombings of Brussels Airport and the Maelbeek metro station, never mind the embarrassing cat-and-mouse chase of the subsequent months, altered that logic of assimilation. The EU capital skipped a heartbeat as the brief but profound militarisation of the city’s streets undermined the state’s credibility.

While simplistic right-wing commentary seeks to pin Brussels as a lost city and its Islamic communities as two-dimensional bomb-throwers, the social reality on the ground is more nuanced. Islamic populations are liberalising fast, even a decade since the attacks, with birth rates on the way to converging with Belgian norms. Nonetheless, Brussels is a city creaking under the same pressures that an average European city is facing, but on steroids.

How Coke Conquered Brussels

You cannot understand Brussels’ ethnic politics without noticing what happened to the drug trade over the last decade. Ten years ago, cannabis was still the dominant substance. Small-scale Moroccan-Belgian networks in communes like Molenbeek, Anderlecht, and Schaerbeek were central, as well as the last traces of native Wallonian and Flemish syndicates.

These Maghrebi crews were parochial and family-based street-corner dealers originating in the hashish flow carried by Moroccan workers into Belgium in the 1970s. Turks, then as now, had a hand in heroin thanks to the country’s role as a gateway to Afghanistan, but Brussels broadly remained a weed city, complemented by a lively pill scene at clubs.

Then came cocaine containerisation. Antwerp became Europe’s largest entry point for Latin American cocaine, and consumption boomed as Brussels became a major logistics hub.

When the Colombian paramilitary FARC signed a peace agreement with Bogotá in 2016, coca-growing areas lost their previous quasi-state control. Farmers expanded coca production without FARC’s checks, resulting in a supply surge that shifted toward Europe, thanks in part to the work of the Kinahan cartel and Moroccan counterparts.

Spillover flooded Brussels with cheap powder as Antwerp gangs emerged as a direct challenger to the state, even forcing the city’s mayor into hiding briefly. The profit margins of cocaine relative to weed magnified the crisis and created perverse incentives.

That underworld collided with the panicked months after the 2016 bombings and is now increasingly bleeding into local politics post-October 7th, as Islamic communities schism with the green and socialist left.

Cocaine especially transformed the city's drug hierarchy. Old-guard Moroccan hashish crews were undercut or forced to integrate into transnational supply chains. Albanian and Colombian brokers started setting the tempo and brought heavy weaponry to enforce their holdings.

Fresh from Marseille, the Algerian mafia is in town, keen to push away amateurish Moroccan rivals, resulting last year in images of men with automatic weapons parading through the metro.

Street networks have remained largely Maghrebi, but the real wholesale leverage moved outward into Dutch-speaking Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Balkan circuits. The result: an escalation in violence. Kalashnikov shootings in Schaerbeek or Anderlecht. When required, gangs establish temporary barricades to wall in communities and ward off the state.

No different from the north inner city of Dublin in the 1980s, where heroin community discipline, manifested through imams and family elders, was eroded. Police crackdowns in Molenbeek displaced activity northward. Schaerbeek flats became safer to stash goods in. Informally, local councillors’ credibility often depends partly on whether their mediation with “youth” succeeds.

Encrypted apps enable gangs to fragment further. Instead of large family networks, micro-crews form and dissolve quickly. The early signs of a crack epidemic are here too, with the cocaine wealth incentivising a new generation of Maghrebi zoomers into the doom-loop of narco-peddling.

While Belgium was looking for jihadists and stigmatising communities, a new class of gangster capitalists carved up the city.

Brussels’ Quiet Counterinsurgency

Around 2012–2014, dozens of young men from Brussels left for Syria, often via cheap buses through Turkey. Groups tolerated by Belgian authorities, like Sharia4Belgium, acted as recruiters, giving Belgium one of Europe’s highest per capita rates of foreign fighters.

A would-be fighting force that could have destabilised the state if they had returned intact. The Brussels bombings and what followed could have been normalised if militants had returned from the Levant.

Apartments in the northern suburbs served as bomb-making labs and hideouts. The 2015 Paris attackers prepared suicide vests in Brussels before transporting them to Paris, almost bringing down the Schengen zone in the process.

Following the terror attacks, EU and Belgian money poured into “radicalisation prevention” projects, allegedly doubling as intelligence-gathering conduits. Prone to internal scandals before the advent of Islamism, Belgium’s security services are historically small and built for Cold War counterespionage. The attacks heralded institutional change.

Post-attacks, the mission of Belgian intelligence pivoted sharply to urban counterterrorism. Naturally, they began to rely more on community intermediaries, erecting a tech dragnet on communications wherever EU and Belgian privacy law allowed through lawful intercepts. In essence, a decade of terror pulled Belgium into a security-state spiral, and the subsequent narco wave ensured it never unwound.

After the bombings, Belgian state security and police were retooled almost entirely toward jihadism. The attacks sent a shiver down the spine of the entire European project due to the implications for the Schengen zone caused by the Syria-Paris-Brussels axis of Islamists. Henceforth, counterterrorism absorbed budget and political oxygen. Narcos thrived in the blind spots.

What’s emerging in this turmoil is not the old Belgium of pillars and compromises, but a Belgium of security enclaves and shadow zones. On one side: the EU Quarter, embassies, and tourist zones. On the other: Schaerbeek flats, Antwerp’s narco corridors, parallel schools co-opted by the gangs, and diaspora-run mosques.

Crack’s sudden visibility in Brussels over the last few years is a small phenomenon with outsized significance. It tells you something about how the narco economy is mutating. For the uninitiated, crack emerges when the market is oversupplied and dealers need to “move down-market.”

Powder cocaine is for the upper and middle classes; crack democratises it for the lower rungs, often catering to Sahel arrivals.

Conclusion: Parallel Sovereignty

Moroccan street gangs, Albanian logisticians, Turkish hybrid actors, and even Flemish nationalists each represent a parallel sovereignty, a replacement for the fading Belgian state. Per Gibbon’s theory of Rome, when the state weakens, new powers—warlords, clans, foreign-backed diasporas—emerge to impose order. This is a very ancient trend that is now being retold on Belgium’s streets.

If, theoretically, these networks consolidate control over Antwerp’s port logistics, the Belgian state will be at the mercy of whichever of these emerges top of the pile and loses control of its biggest economic artery. If narco crews entrench as de facto community authorities, often through Islamo-gauchiste proxies, the Belgian state becomes absent in its own capital.

MIT (Turkish intelligence), Moroccan DGED, and a variety of foreign intermediaries already operate in Brussels, even being present during weeks of community upheaval. If they deepen their roles, whether by shielding criminal allies or repressing dissidents, you end up with multiple foreign services carving up Belgium on the doorstep of a federalised EU superstate.

If narco cash continues to inflate Brussels’ real estate and small-business ecosystem, the city becomes dependent on illicit liquidity financed by the human misery of drug trafficking. That’s systemic corruption, drawing the mainstream into “normalised” laundering.

Contrary to many of the overly excitable identitarians, collapse wouldn’t look like civil war. It would look like a creeping hollowing of the civic and urban space: loss of ports, loss of urban control, diaspora politics overriding Belgian law, with the EU and Flemish separatism administering the remains.

A useful corrective to dramatic “collapse” narratives is to remember that elite change in modern societies usually looks less like conquest and more like churn.

Take the United States between roughly 1880 and 1940. The old WASP establishment—Boston Brahmins, New York Knickerbockers, Protestant political machines—did not simply vanish when Ellis Island immigration surged. Italians, Jews, and Irish entered the country in huge numbers, reshaping urban life.

Prohibition and the nativist politics of the era fuelled the transition.

For a time, and for good reason, the change looked destabilising: New York gangs, Tammany Hall patronage, anarchist bombings, ethnic neighbourhoods seen as “ungovernable.”

But what actually happened was gradual elite turnover through incorporation. Irish political machines captured municipal governments. The WASP order was not violently overthrown; it dissolved into a broader, hybrid ruling class over several generations. Seen in that light, the Brussels story may be closer to that American experience than to late-Roman collapse.

Today, sterile Belgian social democracy plays the role of WASPs, with Moroccans taking the place of the Irish and Sicilians. Indeed, as the Irish and Italians were assimilated into WASP culture, so too are Moroccans and Turks converging with patterns of liberalisation and falling birth rates. Both homelands—Morocco in particular—are keen to put Islamism on the leash, as Gulf financing for jihadism is gradually turned off.

What may be emerging in Brussels is not the disappearance of Belgium, but the birth of a different polity. Like Rome in the age of the Visigoths, the buildings still stand. The question is whether the society that once animated them still does.