At first I read this article thinking that the escuses offered by Faklan Abdeslam—the mother of Paris suicide bomber Ibrahim Abdeslam, who blew himself up during the Paris attacks, injuring another man—were mordantly, bitterly, absurd. Faklan, by the way, is actually the mother of three men implicated in the Paris attacks, the aforementioned Ibrahim and his brothers Salah (getaway car) and Mohamed (unclear what his involvement might be; perhaps none, because he has been released after questioning).
Her denial of any knowledge, and her excuse that Ibrahim could not have possibly meant to kill anyone because he didn’t manage to kill anyone, appeared worthy of The Onion. After all, what young Muslim man straps on a suicide vest and joins a terrorist attack that slaughters well over a hundred people, blows himself up, but is not implicated in being one of the agents of the deal of all?
And it is absurd that his mother denies it. However, what’s not absurd is the fact that these brothers may have had a particularly good cover for the fact that they were jihadis, and this is of grave concern.
Unlike the French citizen who took part in the terrorist attack in Paris, the brothers had no history (other than a trip to Syria for Ibrahim) that would have alarmed the authorities, and their work and social profile argued against it (unless, of course, everyone in the article is lying):
Two weeks ago, the mayor of Molenbeek ordered the closure of a neighborhood bar where Brussels police had found young men dealing drugs and smoking dope over the summer.
Last Friday, the owner blew himself up at another laid-back corner cafe, this time in Paris, on a mission of retribution from Islamic State.
Brahim Abdeslam’s journey from barkeeper to suicide bomber remains a mystery, along with the whereabouts of his younger brother Salah, now on the run as Europe’s most wanted man but until recently the manager of Brahim’s bar, Les Beguines…
There is a seeming disconnect between the ownership by Muslims – whose religion forbids the use of alcohol and tobacco – of a bar, where drugs were being dealt, on a quiet street in the low-rent Brussels borough of Molenbeek who have become the focus of a manhunt for violent Islamists with ties to Syria.
Yet time and again, investigations after attacks like those that killed 129 people in Paris have uncovered tales of workaday Arab immigrant lives, assimilated to the profane daily cares and pleasures of European cities, that have turned, unseen to family and friends, into explosions of pious, suicidal fanaticism.
“It’s shocking, especially when it’s people you’ve hung out with,” said 25-year-old Nabil, as he walked home from work to his apartment nearby, past the cafe on rue des Beguines, now shuttered by court order, which Brahim Abdeslam, 31, had owned.
“They were regular guys, who enjoyed a laugh,” he said, still wearing his workclothes and a Nike baseball cap. “There was nothing radical about them. … They were here just last week hanging out. … I think they were indoctrinated. … There is some mastermind behind it all.”
Hicham, also 25 and in blue tracksuit and sneakers, echoed that view of Brahim and Salah: “They smoked. They didn’t go to the mosque or anything. We saw them every day at the cafe,” he said. Brahim, with a voice “like Sylvester Stallone,” could, he conceded, at times be “a bit crazy”.
“We played cards. We talked about football,” he added. “We talked about the everyday. Nothing jihadist, not about Islam.”
Again, Nabil and Hicham may be lying through their teeth. But if I had to bet, I’d say they’re not. The Abdeslam brothers fit closer to the profile of seemingly happy-go-lucky and well-assimilated pot user Dzhokhar Tsarnaev than they do the Mohammed Atta template.
So I think Nabil may be onto something when he talks about a mastermind, although that’s really not the correct word. But the brothers’ conversion may have been a recent, secret indoctrination, perhaps through the internet rather than the traditional mosque route. Radical mosques are far easier to infiltrate, control, or disband; what can be done about the internet in a free country?
And that, in a way, is even more alarming. There is no simple way to track someone like that, once he is in the country and especially if he, like Ibrahim, is a citizen born in Europe (he was a French citizen born in Brussels). Although at least one of the Paris terrorists (and perhaps more) was a very recent arrival (“refugee”) to Europe, several of them seem to have been native-born, like Ibrahim. A trip to Syria is a red flag, to be sure, but how would it be possible to prevent or monitor that fact? Even if such travel were to be prohibited or cause for being followed by authorities in some way, it would seem extraordinarily difficult to track unless the people involved were to fly directly from European countries to Syria (or arrive back directly from Syria), which is impossible at present. But it is way too easy to travel to a different country and then get into Syria from there (fly to Turkey, for example).
I had at first assumed that Ibrahim’s self-detonation had occurred outside the stadium when he was thwarted at getting in. But no; it was outside a cafe. So there is indeed something odd about it, just as his mother said. She attributes it to stress, but I think we can safely discount that. My leading theory is accidental premature detonation, a well-known hazard of the suicide bomber trade. But there’s still another chilling possibility: that Ibrahim was somehow forced or pressured into this by other jihadi forces; this has been known to sometimes happen with Palestinian suicide bombers.
[NOTE: The family is based in Molenbeek, Brussels, and the mother spoke through an interpreter.]
[ADDENDUM: See this for my view on the relevance of taqiyya in this case.]
