This so-called "war" mainly concerns two sides: the Gwenette Martha group (even though Martha himself and his lieutenant Najib are now dead) and the Houssine Ait S. group. Ait S. is also a former lieutenant of Martha who started for himself when Martha was locked up.

Martha was originally from Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles. He grew up in Amsterdam and came up surrounded by several other guys who would later become names in the Amsterdam underworld: some Antilleans and Surinamese and the Moluccan Belserang brothers (one of whom is now dead, while the other is the leader of the Amsterdam Satudarah chapter- a predominantly Moluccan biker gang, although they have Dutch and Surinamese members as well). It was only later that he began to work a lot with Moroccan criminals from Amsterdam-West.

It is alleged that when Martha heard that the firm surrounding his former lieutenant Ait S. was planning to import a large shipment of coke using the port of Antwerp (which is used a lot by Netherlands-based criminals) and that members of the Antwerp El Y. family were going to unload the shipment, he contacted the El Y. family (with whom he had relations, something the Ait S. gang didn't know) to steal the cocaine instead of turning it over to his rivals. The cocaine went 'missing' and the Ait S. gang had a big problem, because there were a lot of heavy investors connected to the shipment. When suddenly El Y. members were driving around in new flash cars and wore new designer clothes and watches, underworld investors deployed a team of hitmen to Antwerp. One El Y. member was shot, another one was kidnapped and tortured,... No one knows if the El Y. family paid anything, in fact no one really knows for sure if Martha and the El Y. were in fact behind the ripoff. But it has been a war ever since between the two sides. First the killings were for the stolen cocaine, but now it's more because of paranoia.


There are also other feuds going on though. This summer Samir Bouyakhrichan was killed in Marbella. He was one of Amsterdam's biggest drug traffickers. It is not known if he has anything to do with the feud between the Martha group and the Ait S. group.
Bouyakhrichan worked a lot with English and Irish criminal organizations (many of who also use the port of Antwerp). Some of his shipments also went bad. Some believe that this was due to the activities of the organization surrounding Eleftherios Papadatos. He led an Antwerp-based smuggling gang mostly composed of local Greeks and operating from a Greek restaurant. He's an old guy (he's locked up now), but his gang has a vicious reputation for hijacking other criminals' drug shipments at the port. Papadatos is believed to be behind murders as well. Maybe he sabotaged some of Bouyakhrichan's shipments, which caused bad blood between Bouyakhrichan and the English and Irish gangs which caused B's death.
Or maybe Bouyakhrichan was killed because of his former feud with a Dutch Traveller (which are just ethnic Dutch people living in trailer parks, but who like the Irish Travellers have their own distinct culture) gangster which caused the accidental death of the Traveller's young son.
No one knows anything for sure at the moment.