“Why would that be important to know?” he asked. “I don’t think her religion is important here.”
I asked why, in that case, it was always so important to mention the religion of the terrorists, or of people like Hasna Aitboulahcen. “If a Muslim woman has helped find Abaaoud and prevented further attacks, I believe it should be known to the world,” I argued.
He said he couldn’t say any more because she was under police protection. I then reached out to Sonia through an email address in the documents. To my surprise, she wrote back, sending me a phone number.
“I responded to you because I saw you are Muslim yourself,” she said when I called her. I told her we knew she was under police protection and didn’t want to endanger her, but that we believed her role was important and wanted to explain it to the world.
This story felt especially personal to me. Just as I’d felt an obligation to tell Westerners what some Muslims really thought of them after I met Maureen Fanning, I now felt obligated to tell the story of a Muslim woman who had risked her life to make her fellow Europeans safer.
Sonia was living under police protection in Paris, but that didn’t mean much. She hadn’t been given a new name, and although she’d been relocated to a different apartment, there were no police standing guard outside. She was forty-two years old, the mother of several teenagers, and she was living in fear that she’d be killed for ratting out Abaaoud. Even so, she was not sorry about having done it, because she felt that he and the other Paris attackers didn’t share her religion or her morality.
Sonia and her husband, who asked not to be identified, met me at a restaurant in central Paris. I brought along the Post’s local translator, Virgile Demoustier, because Sonia had told me that she wanted to tell some of her story in French. I speak the language, but this was such a sensitive interview that I wanted a native speaker by my side.
We also didn’t know at that time how the French would react to our publishing Sonia’s story. Over dinner and in a long interview afterward at my hotel, I learned that Sonia had been forbidden to talk to the press. Later, we asked a spokesperson from the prosecutor’s office what would happen if a news organization published an interview with her. “Whoever speaks to her and publishes her story, even without her name, will face consequences,” the spokesperson told us. After much debate, we decided to go ahead, figuring it was unlikely that the French would actually try to prosecute the Washington Post. As it turned out, we were right.
Sonia was French, but of Algerian descent. Born and raised in the Vosges region of France, she had grown up in a secular family. “We were born Muslims and we will die Muslims, but nonpracticing,” she said. “Our father never told us when to pray or what to wear.”
She moved to the Paris area in 2010 and met Hasna Aitboulahcen in a nightclub a year later. Aitboulahcen was nineteen or twenty at the time, and Sonia described her as “a disaster! She was like a bum … very skinny, with pimples on her face, greasy hair, a real mess.” The young woman’s father had gone to Morocco without leaving her the keys to his apartment, and she was living on the street, carrying her belongings in a plastic bag. She asked Sonia to help her for a month. “I cooked her lunch, showed her where the shower was, took her dirty clothes to clean them, and gave her my daughter’s clean clothes to wear in the meantime. I gave her cream to clean her face. She wasn’t well, you could tell. There was a lost look in her eyes. She felt embarrassed and ashamed. She told me her story.”
Aitboulahcen and her three siblings had an abusive mother who hit them and denied them food. They were placed in foster care as children. Aitboulahcen stayed with the foster family until she turned seventeen and reunited with her father, who had moved on and remarried his first wife.
I asked Sonia why she’d taken in a complete stranger.
“I’ve always sheltered the homeless, the poor, those who are in need,” she replied.
“People of North African descent?”
“People from any origin. The human being is not meant to live outside in the streets. The human being needs a roof over his head and food on his plate. As I always said: if I were rich, I’d shelter all the homeless.”
Sonia became a kind of surrogate mother to Aitboulahcen. The month turned into years, as Aitboulahcen moved into Sonia’s apartment and became part of her family. There were problems: Aitboulahcen sometimes behaved wildly, and she struggled with various chemical dependencies.
“She lived with me from 2011 to 2014, on and off,” Sonia told me. “She would run away for two weeks, come back [for] a month, over and over again. She took a lot of drugs, mostly cocaine, and drank too much.”
But Aitboulahcen could also be charming and lovable. She washed dishes, expressed genuine gratitude for her adopted family, and told engaging stories about her nights out in Paris. “She would always make us laugh,” Sonia said.
In 2014 and 2015, Aitboulahcen lived with a man from the Comoros Islands, a drug dealer who beat her, and whom she believed she would marry. At about the same time, at Sonia’s suggestion, she reunited with her mother, but the results weren’t happy. She learned that her brother was a Salafist Muslim, and she became captivated by Islam. She began wearing the niqab, the full veil that leaves only the eyes uncovered.
“I told her on WhatsApp that she’d end up in prison if she kept on wearing it,” Sonia said. “She even made videos saying she wanted to go to Syria.”
Aitboulahcen also had begun “chatting with someone in Syria” on WhatsApp, according to transcripts of Sonia’s conversation with French police after the Paris attacks. Aitboulahcen was too cautious to name the recipient of her feverish texts, but it was almost certainly her cousin Abaaoud, given that he was in Syria at the time and the two are believed to have been close.
Although they didn’t grow up in the same city, a strange sense of romance bound them together. Aitboulahcen told friends she would marry Abaaoud, who was two years older than she. She may have had a reason to think so—or it may have been all in her head.
In the summer of 2015, Aitboulahcen traveled to Morocco, apparently to marry a Salafi man who would take her to Syria. She spent several months there but returned to Paris that fall to finalize some documents related to her citizenship at the Moroccan embassy.
“When she came back to me, I told her to take her niqab off. God never asked for this,” Sonia said. “When she told me their plan was to go to Syria, I told her that what she was doing was crazy. ‘You’re going to get raped if you go there,’ I said.”