“As’salam alaikum,” I said.
They looked up in surprise. “By God, I didn’t think you understood Arabic,” one told me. “I thought maybe you were Indian or Pakistani.”
I explained who I was and asked where they were from. They looked nervously at each other. One claimed he was from Mosul and that they had fled ISIS.
“Your dialect reminds me of the way they speak in the South,” I told him. “Like in Basra or Umm Qasr.”
“You know Basra?” one asked.
I nodded and told them that I’d spent several months in Iraq in 2003. “So where are you really from?” I asked.
Two of the older men in the group took me aside and began to tell a story that I knew was still not true, a convoluted tale about having lived in Mosul recently. But at least they confirmed they were from the South and were Shia.
After listening for a while, I looked one directly in the eye. “Could it be that you guys were members of the Iraqi army or some militias?”
One of the men put his index finger to his lips, signaling that I should not mention this too loudly.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because members of other groups are here as well.”
A different group of men claimed to have just escaped from Fallujah. One had a fresh bullet wound. When I asked what they did for a living, one answered “army.” His friend gave him an angry look and corrected him. “We’re all drivers,” the friend said.
After a couple of days of reporting, I was certain that many security challenges lay ahead. Meanwhile, Islamophobia was on the rise in many countries, and my European Muslim friends and I got the feeling that parts of the Muslim community were also growing more religiously conservative, even extremist. The two trends were intertwined and inseparable. The more alienated Muslims felt in Europe, I thought, the more separate they actually became, embedding themselves ever deeper in the faith and community the majority culture was criticizing. I remembered how, when I was fifteen or sixteen and enraged by racism and violence against Muslims in Germany, I wanted to wear the hijab as a sign of protest. My parents talked to me. “You’re angry,” they said, explaining that fury wasn’t a good reason to adopt a religious practice.
Now there was a large group of people coming to Europe who had not been through rigorous security screenings. There was also the question of what they expected from their new lives and what they would do if those expectations were not met.
On Friday, November 13, a series of attacks rocked Paris and a northern suburb, Saint-Denis. Eleven men, including some who had fought in Syria and at least two Iraqis who had used falsified Syrian passports to blend in with the wave of refugees arriving in Europe, attacked the Stade de France, the Bataclan theater, and a handful of restaurants and bars, killing 130 people.
Most of the plotters were the sons of Moroccan migrants in Belgium or France, and I yearned to know what had led to their radicalization. Most of the attackers had long been known to French police for crimes such as drug dealing and robbery. In short, they were petty gangsters.
I grew especially interested in Abdelhamid Abaaoud, one of the ringleaders. He was among the attackers who had spent time fighting in Syria but had made it back to Europe, even though they were wanted by authorities. Abaaoud had grown up in Brussels’ Molenbeek neighborhood, the oldest son of Moroccan immigrants. By his late teens, Abaaoud had been expelled from school, had become involved in neighborhood gangs, and had embarked on a life of small-time crime. Between 2006 and 2012 he served a number of brief jail terms for misdemeanors. When he got out for the last time, his father later told investigators, Abaaoud had changed. He grew a beard, stopped hanging out with his neighborhood friends, and promised his father he’d never go back to prison.
Instead, he traveled to Egypt to study Arabic, and then to Syria, where he told friends back home that he “wanted to help the innocents.” In late 2013, he was spotted in Molenbeek. Belgian authorities were watching him, but a few months later he returned to Syria and what he called the “caliphate,” taking his thirteen-year-old brother with him.
I wondered what might have happened, not only to him but inside his family as well. After the Paris attacks, I spent some time in Molenbeek, and from the outside it sounded as if Abaaoud had had plenty of opportunities to forge a life for himself. His father owned a business that imported items from Morocco to sell and was not in bad financial shape. Abaaoud had gone to a private school. But there were problems in his parents’ marriage. Abaaoud was closer to his mother than to his father. According to intelligence sources, Abaaoud was frustrated and angered by how his father lived his life and by the constant fights at home.
Molenbeek didn’t look like the banlieues I had visited in France. There weren’t any gray high-rise buildings, and the shops and coffeehouses reminded me of Morocco. But the Post’s Belgian stringer Annabell Van den Berghe told me how difficult it was to get information; the people in Molenbeek didn’t like to speak to reporters. And while it might not have looked as dismal as the banlieues, Molenbeek had many similar problems. The unemployment rate was about 30 percent, and in some areas even higher; there was a high percentage of foreign-born individuals; and many people lived in poverty. Radical Islam and sectarian conflicts also thrived. Some deplored the influence of Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Qatari religious organizations, claiming that they financially supported radical Sunni Islam in the area.
On our first visit, Annabell and I tried to get a feel for the people and the area, so we looked for a busy coffee shop. When we found one and went in, we realized the only people inside were men. They looked just as surprised to see two female visitors.
“As’salam alaikum,” I said. It was a greeting but also a signal that I shared their cultural background. “Wa’alaikum as’salam,” a few replied.
I tried to break the ice with the serious-looking waiter, asking in Moroccan Arabic if they had some Moroccan pancakes or sfinj, a kind of Moroccan doughnut. He must have been in his twenties, the same age as most of the attackers, and he began to laugh. “I wish I did,” he said. “I can offer you baguette or croissants.”
“How about Moroccan tea?”
“That I can do.”
The TV was on, and a group of men was following a soccer match. When the waiter brought the tea, I told him that I was a journalist and asked him if he knew any of the men who had been involved in “what happened in Paris.”
“I have only seen them when they used to live here and would stop by for a coffee, or on the streets, but I wasn’t friends with them,” he said.