This is a freakin' great cover story, at Der Spiegel, "
Europe's Jihadists: What the Paris Attacks Tell Us about IS Strategy":
The biographies of those behind the Paris attacks offer deep insight into the structures and organization of Islamic State in Europe. And they confirm what experts have long warned about: The new jihadists have our cities in their sights.
On the horrific evening in Paris that only ended after 130 people had been slaughtered in jihadist attacks, something strange happened at 10:28 p.m., a development that only came to the attention of investigators much later. On the upper end of Boulevard Voltaire, where the Bataclan concert hall is located, three terrorists were in the process of gunning down people with their Kalashnikovs and exchanging salvos with the police, who were closing in on them. At the lower end of the street, another man exited from the Metro -- Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected leader behind the attacks.
He had just been a part of the group that had killed 39 people at La Belle Équipe, Le Carillon and Le Petit Cambodge. For a while afterwards, he had driven around aimlessly in a black SEAT through the neighborhood's streets, before parking it in the Montreuil suburb. He was then caught on CCTV cameras at 10:14 p.m. inside the Croix de Chavaux Metro station, as he jumped the turnstile to avoid paying and traveled back to the scene of the crime.
Over the next two hours, Abaaoud apparently went for a walk through the 10th and 11th arrondissements, the area where he had just unleashed a bloodbath. Investigators later used the geolocation data from his mobile phone to trace his movements that evening. At 12:28 a.m., as anti-terror units were entering the concert hall, the phone was just next to Bataclan. It's as if Abaaoud wanted to convince himself of his own success and view firsthand the inferno he had helped unleash. It wasn't much later that French President François Hollande arrived at the scene.
It's a disturbing thought, but one that also seems fitting for a terrorist as vain and brutal as Abaaoud. This, after all, was not the first time he had outfoxed security forces.
In terms of media coverage, Abaaoud had been Belgium's best-known jihadist, and yet he nevertheless managed to travel back and forth between Syria and Europe without raising attention and would ultimately conduct the Paris attacks together with an entire group of other jihadists. Few others have reported as openly on social media about their adventures in Syria as Abaaoud. In Dabiq magazine, an official propaganda organ of Islamic State (IS), he had boasted in January that he could "plan operations" and come and go as he pleased despite the fact that "my name and my picture have been all over the news."
Is the Worst Yet to Come?
With Abdelhamid Abaaoud and his men, Islamist terror in Europe has reached a new level. It's the first time that a major European city has experienced such a complex attack at the hands of the Islamic State, which resulted in 130 deaths and 350 wounded. In the week that followed, Brussels, another major European city, announced a state of emergency, a rare occasion in the postwar era. The city shut down its Metro system and closed schools. Local authorities said they took the dramatic steps in order to prevent attacks like the ones committed in Paris the previous weekend.
For years, terror experts had been warning about their fears of terrorist attacks in Europe and, in recent days, they appear to have become reality. The attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris and Copenhagen at the beginning of 2015 weren't isolated cases, Peter Neumann, a professor of security studies at King's College London, warned in his new book "The New Jihadists," published in September in German. He believes what we have just witnessed are the "first, very dramatic warnings of what will play out on the streets of Europe in the next decades." Europe, he cautions, is standing "at the precipice of a new wave of terror that will still occupy us for a generation to come."
French journalist and jihad expert David Thomson offers a similarly bleak assessment. "Attacks like this will no longer be something completely extraordinary," he warns. "I can't say whether something like this will happen every six months or every year."
Thomson says that, according to his research, an Islamic State unit led by a Frenchman is currently preparing attacks in Europe. After the terrorist attacks in Paris, Western intelligence agencies intercepted communications between Abaaoud and Islamic State leadership in Syria. There had been similar clues after the attack in Beirut the day before and also after IS brought down a Russian jet carrying vacationers over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. When IS issued a claim of responsibility for the Paris attacks a few hours later, it provided no information about the perpetrators. But German authorities say this is standard practice for IS: The order is issued by the leadership, but it is then carried out solely by the terrorist cell.
'Islamic State Is Acting in Europe'
"We must assume that this was the first coordinated series of attacks," an internal government paper dating from Nov. 23 states. "The Islamic State is acting in Europe. The concerted action and the means used in the crime point to very well-trained perpetrators prepared to do anything, as well as longer and highly conspiratorial planning of the attack."
It's a disturbing development. In contrast to al-Qaida before it, terror attacks on the West had not previously been a part of Islamic State strategy. Instead, the group had limited itself to expanding its territories in Iraq and Syria and establishing state-like structures....
A Trove of Mobile Phone Photos
For German jihadists, that included questioning from a German-speaking IS fighter about motivation, ancestry and acquaintances. Former jihadist Ayoub B., from Wolfsburg, likens such units to a kind of Islamic State domestic intelligence agency. Upon arrival, he was interviewed by Mustafa K. and Nils D., two men belonging to a group from Dinslaken who were involved in almost all relevant activities undertaken by Islamic State troops. After questioning, Islamic State divides foreigners into two groups: suicide bombers and fighters. Thus far, German officials have identified more than 20 German suicide bombers.
The life of Abdelhamid Abaaoud of Belgium is better documented than almost any other jihadist. In spring 2014, the French journalist Étienne Huver came into possession of photos and videos that had been saved on Abaaoud's mobile phone. Huver had traveled to the Syrian city of Azaz, just a few kilometers from the border with Turkey, not long after Syrian rebels had finally managed to push the Islamic State out following an extended occupation. In Azaz, Huver was contacted by Syrian rebels who offered him photos of European IS fighters. "They told us: You have to publish them. People are coming from you to us and killing Syrians," Huver says.
The rebels had managed to copy the data with the help of a supporter who worked in an Internet café that Abaaoud frequented. When Abaaoud connected his mobile phone to a computer to share his photos with friends via Facebook, the Internet café employee made a secret copy. All of the photos were taken between Jan. 7 and Feb. 26, 2014.
An image taken on Feb. 1 shows him in Syria for the first time, wearing a wool vest and an oversized Afghan pakol cap and posing for selfies with a Kalashnikov. In one photo, he has his head thrown back and the morning sun shines onto his face. He sent the photo to friends and acquaintances back home in Belgium -- and also to young women he wanted to impress.
The photos and videos Abaaoud made during the ensuing four weeks were for his own private use. They consistently show him with the same group of people: Eight young men who speak accent-free French and broken Arabic with a North African accent. All of them are Frenchmen or French-speaking Belgians. It almost seems as though they were a group of friends enjoying a bit of adventure in Syria.
Francophone Fighting Unit
Abaaoud gave himself the nom de guerre "Abu Omar al-Soussi" -- Abu Omar from the Souss Massa, a region in Morocco where his parents are from. Islamic State, however, dubbed him "Abou Omar Al-Beljiki," transforming him back into the Belgian he was.
Some of those in the group already knew each other from Brussels. Others likely only met in Syria when they joined the French-speaking unit that Belgians and French fighters were assigned to for matters of simplicity. It was deemed too problematic to put them in Arabic-speaking units because they wouldn't have been able to understand the orders given.
German security officials believe that the plans for the Paris attacks were likely developed within this Francophone fighting unit. German Islamic State fighters, by contrast, are spread out among several different units.
During his first days in Azaz, it has become clear, Abaaoud had close contact with notorious German Islamists; in spring 2014, his group lived in the same house with the "Lohberger Brigade," a group of young men from the Lohberg neighborhood of the Ruhr Valley city of Dinslaken who joined the jihad in 2013. During the time they lived together, the two groups posed with decapitated heads in front of the same statue in the center of Azaz.
Early on, Abaaoud seemed fascinated by the violence perpetrated by the Islamic State fighters and documented it on his mobile phone. "They fought for democracy and secularism, and thus, against us," Abaaoud narrates in one video of dead rebel fighters -- a comment that had little to do with the power struggle underway between the Syrian rebels of Azaz and Islamic State.
Abaaoud was notable even then, a natural leader because of his charisma. He instructed his comrades to speak into the camera or told them to take a picture of him next to a foreign IS fighter. He seemed to have a clear goal in mind with his photos and videos: that of encouraging more young people from Europe to join Islamic State....
A Shoot Out in Saint-Denis
It was only four days after the attacks in Paris that officials were able to track down Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who spent the evening of the attacks near the Bataclan. Together with two other members of his cell, Abaaoud had barricaded himself in an apartment in Saint-Denis. One of them was his alleged cousin, Hasna Ait Boulahcen.
Officials believe they were planning another attack, this time on the La Défense quarter of Paris. In Saint-Denis, he and his accomplices engaged in a seven-hour battle with the hundreds of police, anti-terror officers and soldiers who deployed to capture him. The operation ended with their deaths.
French security officials knew soon after the operation that Abaaoud was among the dead, but kept the information quiet for quite some time. The police had found several mobile phones in the possession of the now dead terror suspects and hoped to use them to find Abaaoud's contacts.
Still, two weeks after the attacks in Paris, many questions remain open. Not all of the perpetrators have yet been identified and investigations continue into several suspects.
Most of all, though: Nobody knows if the next Abdelhamid Abaaoud has long-since set up shop in Europe.
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