Intercommunal tensions simmer as rival gangs of immigrated Turks and Kurds continue to fight across eastern Belgium this week, following Sunday’s eruption of imported sectarian violence.
After an incident involving the flying of Kurdish PKK flags in a predominantly Turkish area, Belgian security services were deployed to protect mosques in the Limburg municipality of Heusden-Zolder on Monday. Reportedly, a convoy of Kurds flew Marxist-Leninist PKK militia flags through a Turkish neighbourhood, leading to an immediate response from local youth.
The clashes occurred in Ghent, East Flanders, as well as northern Brussels. Media sources admit that the conflicting accounts and the relative insularity of the rival immigrant communities made accurate reporting difficult.
Belgian police turned water cannons on hundreds of mostly young Kurdish males assembled outside the European Parliament Monday. The Kurds were protesting against sectarian violence directed at their community by Turkish ultranationalist groups during the past week. Belgian police were deployed to defend mosques and schools in the east of the country.
Turkish community groups claim they are only responding to reciprocal violence from PKK-adjacent terrorists, with footage emerging of Kurdish militants attacking a Turkish cafe sometime this week and reports of a firebombing attack on a Turkish cultural association in France.
Increasingly concerned by narco-fueled violence and imported ethnic strife, Belgian PM Alexander De Croo convened a meeting of the National Security Council on Wednesday morning to discuss both worsening gang violence and recent conflicts between immigrant communities, with Brussels and Antwerp becoming hotbeds of gun violence in recent years.
Decades of migration and demographic change has created a large, settled Turkish community in the north of Brussels, making many commentators concerned by the influence of the ruling AKP party over the diaspora, as well as the importation of ethnic conflict with Kurds.
Social media images and some media reports suggest Turkey’s Nationalist Movement’s paramilitary arm—the Grey Wolves—has been involved in the recent unrest. In 2021, the European Parliament called for the EU to add the group to its list of terrorists—something that did not happen.
PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, has been classified as a terrorist organisation by the EU since 2002, and has the same label in the U.S., and several other jurisdictions. A Belgian court ruled in 2020 that the group was not a terrorist organisation but “an actor in an internal armed conflict.” The Belgian government, however, said the ruling did not affect its definition of PKK as a terrorist group.
