“Until the tenth grade, and then I left,” he said.
It seemed to me that he liked to argue and debate, but he hadn’t considered studying and finishing school as a way to improve his life.
“Studying? For what? To become a cabdriver?” he scoffed.
I looked at him. “You can always find some reason not to try to achieve something.”
He looked at me in surprise. “Don’t you believe me? You think I am lying?” he asked.
I tried to lower the temperature. I told him I just wanted to understand why he didn’t think he had a choice in life. Abaaoud and Abdeslam had had a choice as well.
He said he understood what I meant, but that most of the parents in this area didn’t understand their children well and didn’t care much about how they were doing in school. As I’d realized when I got to know more about Abaaoud’s troubled family, sending your son to private school doesn’t make you a good parent. Farid and Abaaoud, like many children of Muslim migrants in Europe, had grown up in an awkward situation. They’d been born into European society, but they saw their parents invest all their money in trying to build a reputation back home. Farid told me that he, Abaaoud, and their friends and families were forced to live on a pittance most of the year, only to see their parents lavish gifts on friends and relatives in their native countries. The kids didn’t know if they were Belgian, French, or Moroccan, and the parents didn’t care if their children integrated. They cared about making money and building businesses, but especially about becoming somebody in the eyes of people back home. The drive to prove they had succeeded was so powerful that it overwhelmed everything else. “It was the same for all of us,” Farid told me. “We lived here like shit, and all they cared about was what people thought in Morocco, and how they could show them that they’d made it.”
Perhaps as a result, Farid had been drawn to easy money. He carried a big roll of fifty-euro bills, and I understood that even though he was out of prison, he wasn’t working in a kitchen or supermarket. “If nobody believes that you can become something and if you grow up in a neighborhood like Molenbeek, it’s very hard to believe in yourself and see yourself in a different life than the one I’m living now.”
When he heard about the Paris attacks, he’d celebrated, he told me. He felt that France and all of Europe had been taught a lesson as well, because most of the attackers were French and Belgian citizens. “They paid them back for treating Muslims like shit for decades,” he said.
I asked what he thought about the fact that most Muslims didn’t share his views and that many had even spoken up against terrorism and these attacks.
“Those are people from our parents’ generation, but this is not the real Islam,” he answered. His words echoed what I’d heard from so many others. The former rapper Abu Talha had also told me that most first-generation Muslim immigrants in Europe were only living the Islam they had learned from their home countries.
It didn’t make sense to argue with Farid, I realized. His worldview was set.
When I asked the waitress for the bill, Farid said he would like to pay for our drinks. I told him that there was no need, but he insisted, saying that since he had a gun on him we had no other choice. He smiled and winked.
“You have a gun?” I whispered.
“That’s normal here. I have a gun and a knife on me. You never know.”
We said good-bye and left, and I wondered what might have been done to deter Farid from criminality and, one day, possibly terrorism. The roles of parents, friends, community leaders, teachers, and youth workers seemed crucial. Beyond that, of course, there was the general mind-set that confronted young Muslims as they came of age in Europe. Farid believed he wasn’t accepted by Belgian society, so he saw no problem with stealing from or even killing Belgians and other Europeans. It was as if they weren’t real. Each side had succeeded in dehumanizing the other.
I tried to get in touch with Abdelhamid Abaaoud’s parents. His father had told a respected member of the community that he would speak to me, and I was given his phone number. But a few days before we were supposed to meet, he told me that a newspaper had offered him a lot of money for the story of his son and that I could match it if I wanted to.
I told him that we never paid for information, adding that I was surprised to hear and see how after all that had happened he seemed more interested in money than in helping the world see his son as a human being, rather than simply as a deranged killer.
French police found and killed Abaaoud five days after the Paris attacks, during a raid on an apartment in Saint-Denis. The big question on everyone’s mind was how they had learned where he was hiding. In a press conference on the day Abaaoud was killed, Paris prosecutor Fran?ois Molins said that the police had been led to him by a crucial source, but he declined to give details.
I later learned that, after the attacks, Abaaoud had reached out to a cousin living in Paris named Hasna Aitboulahcen, asking for help. She did not let him down. In fact, she was one of two people killed alongside Abaaoud in Saint-Denis. As a result, her name was in the media for days, and photographs circulated on social media, supposedly showing her bathing (they later turned out to be pictures of somebody else). Some even suspected that she had become the “first female suicide bomber in Europe.”
The attacks in Paris reignited a debate about the place of Islam in Europe, along with increased fears about the possibility that Muslim women could turn into suicide bombers or participate in plots to kill and terrorize people. Once again, I read editorials in many European newspapers asking why Muslims weren’t doing more to fight terrorism. People wondered if the Paris attackers had had some kind of protection system within the Muslim communities in Belgium and France that could have helped them operate without the police finding out.
In a batch of investigative files, I learned of a woman who apparently had informed the police about Abaaoud’s return to Europe, and specifically to France. The more my colleague Greg Miller and I went through the documents, the more it looked like this woman—we called her Sonia—had played a crucial and largely unknown role. For me, one detail about her stood out: she appeared to have been Muslim.
I reached out to various sources and asked if they could tell me more about the true story of how Abaaoud was found.
“There was this one woman, but she is now under police protection,” a French government source told me, but he refused to tell me anything about her background.
“Was she a Muslim woman?”