I asked if he had any idea where they hung out, but he said he didn’t.
Annabell and I waited for customers who might have been in the same age group as Abdelhamid Abaaoud or Salah Abdeslam, another suspect in the French attacks, both of whom were on the run. Finally, a younger man came in and ordered a coffee and a croissant. I looked at the waiter and pointed with my eyes to the customer who had just ordered. The waiter nodded, and I understood that the young man might know something.
When I approached him, he told me that he and Abaaoud used to hang out sometimes but that they hadn’t been in touch for a long time. “All this that happened is very bad for all of us, everybody will think we in Molenbeek are all dangerous,” he told me.
He gave me one tip: he suggested I go to a sandwich place not far from the coffee shop. “They used to spend a lot of time there, and you’ll find more of their friends,” he said.
Annabell and I made our way to the sandwich shop, where two very well-built men who looked like brothers worked side by side. They had several customers, and they all seemed to know one another.
One tall young man in jeans, a sweatshirt, and a dark blue jacket looked at me. I looked back at him and smiled. He smiled back, took his sandwich, and went outside. He looked the way I imagined a friend of Abaaoud and Abdeslam might, with an air of gangster cool. My instincts told me to follow him.
“Excuse me, please,” I said outside. “As’salam alaikum.”
He stopped walking and turned around. “Wa’alaikum as’salam. Oui, mademoiselles?” he answered.
I told him that I was a journalist and explained I was there to learn more about Molenbeek. I went on, trying to find a diplomatic way of getting at what I really wanted to ask, when he stated the question for me.
“So you want to ask questions about those who did the attacks in Paris and whether I knew them?” he asked in Moroccan Arabic.
“Yes.”
He told me that he had known Abaaoud, Abdeslam, and others who had left for Syria. “Do you know that we usually don’t like to speak to journalists here?” he asked. “Recently a camera team was hit with stones. But since you are of Moroccan descent and don’t work for one of the lying tabloids, we can have a coffee at least.”
We went to a nearby bar, where the waitress greeted him warmly and he called her by her first name. He was evidently a regular. The room was cloudy with cigarette smoke. Even though it was about 1:30 p.m., most of the customers were drinking beer or other alcoholic drinks.
He saw my look of surprise. “This place is okay. I feel safe speaking to you here. Most of the people here don’t speak Arabic, so we can speak freely.” We sat next to each other on a wooden bench, with Annabell sitting across from us. (She remained mostly silent during the conversation, as she did not understand the Moroccan dialect.) He agreed to speak only if I promised not to mention his real name. He said I could call him “Farid,” his grandfather’s name.
Farid told me he’d been born in Belgium to Moroccan parents who had moved to Brussels in their youth. His father worked in the coal mines, while his mother stayed home to care for the children. He said that he had spent several years in prison for taking part in robberies, selling guns, and other crimes.
“I was born here in this neighborhood, like Abdelhamid and Salah,” he said. “We were all friends.”
Farid was tall, with fair skin and dark brown eyes. He had a nice smile, which he flashed a few times, but he was angry, too. He spoke as if he didn’t feel accepted anywhere. “When you do something great, the Belgians will say you are Belgian and the Moroccans will say you are Moroccan,” he said. “But if you do something bad, the Belgians will say you are Moroccan and the Moroccans will say you are Belgian.”
It’s a paradox many of us in the second generation of Muslim immigrants to Europe have felt. I had called the Moroccan embassy in Brussels after the attacks and asked if they had anybody who was dealing with the Moroccan community or challenges faced by second-generation immigrants. “These terrorists, they weren’t Moroccan,” the person at the embassy told me. “They were French or Belgian citizens.”
I said that I understood this, but that they were still somehow attached to Morocco through their parents, some of whom had homes and businesses in their country of origin. He was adamant that this wasn’t a Moroccan problem.
Farid explained that people such as Abaaoud, Abdeslam, and he despised Belgium or France as much as they did Morocco. He said that they had often discussed questions of identity, home, and relationships with their families.
“They all treat us bad. In fact, the people in Morocco and other Arab countries will treat the white man or woman better than they will treat people like you and me,” he said. Farid recalled colonial times, and how France and other European powers never discussed “the crimes they have committed in those countries.” His father and his friends had worked very hard and helped to build Belgium, but they hadn’t made enough money for a decent living, he said. “My parents are getting eight hundred euros and have to pay rent and all other things. After working over thirty-five years in a job Belgians didn’t want to do, that’s all my father gets.” He told me that he’d sworn he wouldn’t let the Belgians take advantage of him.
I agreed that our parents’ generation had mainly worked in physically demanding jobs in Europe. “But what would they have done if they’d stayed in Morocco?” I asked.
“Nothing, of course. What could they have done in Morocco? In Morocco, you become something only if you come from one of those famous and very rich families. Don’t you think I’m right?”
The more I listened, the more it sounded as if he saw himself as everyone’s victim. I told him that I share certain frustrations about Morocco, that I had not come from one of those famous and very rich families, as he called them, and that I also felt that sometimes I wasn’t fully accepted by one side or the other. But that wasn’t a reason to join ISIS.
“You mean the dawla?” he asked, using an Arabic word favored by ISIS sympathizers that means “the state.” “The caliphate?”
I nodded. He seemed familiar with the ideology.
“I admire al-Baghdadi and all the brothers there, they are real good Muslims,” he said. “They are finally the ones who show these pigs in the West that Muslims are no longer victims.”
I needed to challenge his victimization narrative. I told him that from my understanding, Abdeslam and Abaaoud had dealt drugs and committed robberies. How did this fit into his idea of being a good and innocent Muslim?
“This society deserves it,” he shot back. “They are all racist, and people like us have no other choice. If you apply for a job and your address says Molenbeek and your name is Arabic, you won’t get it.” It was the same complaint I had heard in the banlieues outside Paris.
I asked Farid whether he’d gone to school.