I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  In the train stations of Austria, I began to see signs that this was already happening. Merkel had spoken of the magnitude of the refugee crisis and the need to temporarily open Germany’s borders to families fleeing war. But in some parts of the world, her speech wasn’t fully translated or was shared in fragments on social media. It was interpreted by many as an open invitation—a onetime shot at a new life in Europe. People from all over North Africa, the Middle East, and even South Asia flew to Turkey, destroyed their passports, and joined the flood of refugees. The numbers were so large that European authorities didn’t have time to set up a comprehensive system of translators and others who could verify people’s identities or at least confirm that they were really Syrian or fleeing severe conflict.

  While wandering through the train stations in Vienna, I heard many different dialects of Arabic: Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Egyptian, Yemeni. I also heard Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi.

  I met a tall man in his late twenties named Hamza. He confessed that he was from Algeria and told me that he’d spent half his life in prison there for selling drugs and attempted murder. He said that the wave of refugees had offered an ideal cover for people like him to slip into Europe. Hamza wore jeans and a T-shirt and smiled a lot, thrilled to have made it this far. He had a group of friends with him who didn’t look like they wanted to work as cooks or cleaners. Maybe I was being uncharitable, but to me they looked like trouble.

  “We flew to Istanbul and then took a bus to Izmir,” Hamza told me. “There we destroyed our passports and just mixed with the Syrian refugees. We then took a boat from Izmir to Greece. From there to Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, and now we are in Vienna.” He said that he had seen many other North Africans arriving to join the refugees, and he introduced me to some of his Algerian friends.

  Portions of several major train stations in Vienna had been converted into makeshift campsites for refugees. In these enclosed areas, the smell of sweat and food mixed with urine and feces—some of the children and others had been unable to use toilets during their long trips from Turkey and beyond and had relieved themselves in their clothes or used other methods. I saw people with skin diseases and lice. People who had a bit of money told me they’d hired cabs or buses to speed their journey, while others walked. Some had been on the road for a week or more. In addition to the cots and food stations, local volunteers who spoke Arabic were on hand to help the travelers.

  While walking around the stations, I noticed that most of the refugees were men. Many told me they’d come from Damascus, though they didn’t have the lighter olive skin tones common in Syria; instead, they looked more North African, with curlier hair and darker skin and eyes. When I asked which part of the city, they walked away.

  An Austrian security official told me that there were thriving black markets for Syrian passports in Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, and Austria, in addition to Turkey. But most of these people had arrived in Vienna without ever having shown a passport or document to officials, as long as they traveled in a stream of asylum seekers. Authorities along the way might have asked for names and countries of origin, but they weren’t scrutinizing documents. Opportunists could easily pass through borders simply by claiming to be Syrian, without offering any proof.

  But when I heard Syrian and Iraqi dialects, I stopped to listen. There were enough pretenders that the true Syrians began to complain about the false Syrians, saying that opportunists such as Hamza would quickly wear out their welcome, if they hadn’t already.

  “Look at these people, what are they doing here?” a sixty-two-year-old Syrian named Mustafa asked me. He was lean and his black hair was streaked with gray; he’d traveled to Austria with his son and a group of other Syrians and was now waiting to buy a train ticket to Germany. “We are the ones who are fleeing from war and slaughter, and now these men are taking away our space.” He had paused to help a woman who had fainted, giving a group of Afghans the opportunity to cut ahead of him in line.

  Real Syrians, too, often had no documents, so it was hard to verify what they said. When I talked to a few of those carrying Syrian documents, I learned that they had been living in refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey, or Lebanon and had seized the opportunity to come to Europe, mainly for economic reasons.

  People told me they believed that in Germany they would get furnished apartments, cars, money for each child, and health care, as well as the chance to open their own businesses. Some young adults asked me about the universities, and whether tuition was free.

  I sympathized with their wish for a better life. Many had been through traumatic situations, and suffering was written on their faces. But some of these conversations tried my patience. When I asked, here and there, if they would agree to work for the benefits they received, I sometimes heard answers like, “I don’t want my wife or daughter to work.”

  “Cleaning houses or washing dishes?” one Syrian woman said incredulously. “No, that’s not for me.” She was in her late twenties and said she had been a teacher in Syria. I thought back to my conversation with Abu Hussain, my driver in Bahrain, who’d expressed similar horror at the notion of members of his family having to take menial jobs.

  I also wondered about the idea some German politicians were spreading that most of the people who were coming were highly educated and had professional backgrounds. “Educationally, they are the flower of their country,” read an article produced by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, referring to the Syrian refugees arriving in Europe. “Eighty-six percent say they have secondary school or university education.” That wasn’t what I saw in the train stations. Most of the Syrians I met were farmers or laborers. They didn’t speak any other language than Arabic and hadn’t spent much time in school. That wasn’t a problem in itself, but politicians and the media were telling a very different story, suggesting that the influx of new refugees would fill a growing gap in Germany’s aging workforce, reducing unemployment and helping to propel the economy.

  I also met some migrants who said they’d lived under ISIS and liked it. My colleague William Booth and I chatted with one young man who said he had come from the so-called caliphate. “It’s good to live under Islamic law,” he told us. Bill and I traded looks. Why, then, had he chosen to leave? we asked. “Because of the job opportunities,” he said, adding that he was still in touch with people back home.

  Bill and I spent hours roaming around the train stations, trying to speak to as many people as possible. In the city’s main train station, Wien Hauptbahnhof, we found a group of Iraqi men who were sitting cross-legged on a blanket near a staircase.

  I knew they were Iraqi from their accents. Iraqis comprised one of the largest groups among the refugees. One of the men showed another his smartphone. “Illa tahin,” he said. “This is what we have to do with all of them.”

  Illa tahin means “grind them to dust” in Arabic. It was the slogan of a Shia commander named Ayyub al-Rubaie, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Azrael. He made news in August 2015 when a video circulated on the Internet showing him slicing flesh from the burned body of an alleged ISIS fighter. “ISIS, this will be your fate, we will cut you like shwarma,” he said in the video. A number of Shia militias aligned with the Iraqi government have been accused of atrocities and serious human rights violations against Sunnis in Iraq as part of their broader war against ISIS.

  The men were just about to dig into white plastic plates of rice, chicken, and salads they’d gotten from one of the aid stations. I walked up to them.

  “As’salam alaikum,” I said.

  They looked up in surprise. “By God, I didn’t think you understood Arabic,” one told me. “I thought maybe you were Indian or Pakistani.”

  I explained who I was and asked where they were from. They looked nervously at each other. One claimed he was from Mosul and that they had fled ISIS.

  “Your dialect reminds me of the way they speak in the South,” I told him. “Like in Basra or Umm Qasr.”

  “You know Basra?” one
asked.

  I nodded and told them that I’d spent several months in Iraq in 2003. “So where are you really from?” I asked.

  Two of the older men in the group took me aside and began to tell a story that I knew was still not true, a convoluted tale about having lived in Mosul recently. But at least they confirmed they were from the South and were Shia.

  After listening for a while, I looked one directly in the eye. “Could it be that you guys were members of the Iraqi army or some militias?”

  One of the men put his index finger to his lips, signaling that I should not mention this too loudly.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because members of other groups are here as well.”

  A different group of men claimed to have just escaped from Fallujah. One had a fresh bullet wound. When I asked what they did for a living, one answered “army.” His friend gave him an angry look and corrected him. “We’re all drivers,” the friend said.

  After a couple of days of reporting, I was certain that many security challenges lay ahead. Meanwhile, Islamophobia was on the rise in many countries, and my European Muslim friends and I got the feeling that parts of the Muslim community were also growing more religiously conservative, even extremist. The two trends were intertwined and inseparable. The more alienated Muslims felt in Europe, I thought, the more separate they actually became, embedding themselves ever deeper in the faith and community the majority culture was criticizing. I remembered how, when I was fifteen or sixteen and enraged by racism and violence against Muslims in Germany, I wanted to wear the hijab as a sign of protest. My parents talked to me. “You’re angry,” they said, explaining that fury wasn’t a good reason to adopt a religious practice.

  Now there was a large group of people coming to Europe who had not been through rigorous security screenings. There was also the question of what they expected from their new lives and what they would do if those expectations were not met.

  On Friday, November 13, a series of attacks rocked Paris and a northern suburb, Saint-Denis. Eleven men, including some who had fought in Syria and at least two Iraqis who had used falsified Syrian passports to blend in with the wave of refugees arriving in Europe, attacked the Stade de France, the Bataclan theater, and a handful of restaurants and bars, killing 130 people.

  Most of the plotters were the sons of Moroccan migrants in Belgium or France, and I yearned to know what had led to their radicalization. Most of the attackers had long been known to French police for crimes such as drug dealing and robbery. In short, they were petty gangsters.

  I grew especially interested in Abdelhamid Abaaoud, one of the ringleaders. He was among the attackers who had spent time fighting in Syria but had made it back to Europe, even though they were wanted by authorities. Abaaoud had grown up in Brussels’ Molenbeek neighborhood, the oldest son of Moroccan immigrants. By his late teens, Abaaoud had been expelled from school, had become involved in neighborhood gangs, and had embarked on a life of small-time crime. Between 2006 and 2012 he served a number of brief jail terms for misdemeanors. When he got out for the last time, his father later told investigators, Abaaoud had changed. He grew a beard, stopped hanging out with his neighborhood friends, and promised his father he’d never go back to prison.

  Instead, he traveled to Egypt to study Arabic, and then to Syria, where he told friends back home that he “wanted to help the innocents.” In late 2013, he was spotted in Molenbeek. Belgian authorities were watching him, but a few months later he returned to Syria and what he called the “caliphate,” taking his thirteen-year-old brother with him.

  I wondered what might have happened, not only to him but inside his family as well. After the Paris attacks, I spent some time in Molenbeek, and from the outside it sounded as if Abaaoud had had plenty of opportunities to forge a life for himself. His father owned a business that imported items from Morocco to sell and was not in bad financial shape. Abaaoud had gone to a private school. But there were problems in his parents’ marriage. Abaaoud was closer to his mother than to his father. According to intelligence sources, Abaaoud was frustrated and angered by how his father lived his life and by the constant fights at home.

  Molenbeek didn’t look like the banlieues I had visited in France. There weren’t any gray high-rise buildings, and the shops and coffeehouses reminded me of Morocco. But the Post’s Belgian stringer Annabell Van den Berghe told me how difficult it was to get information; the people in Molenbeek didn’t like to speak to reporters. And while it might not have looked as dismal as the banlieues, Molenbeek had many similar problems. The unemployment rate was about 30 percent, and in some areas even higher; there was a high percentage of foreign-born individuals; and many people lived in poverty. Radical Islam and sectarian conflicts also thrived. Some deplored the influence of Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Qatari religious organizations, claiming that they financially supported radical Sunni Islam in the area.

  On our first visit, Annabell and I tried to get a feel for the people and the area, so we looked for a busy coffee shop. When we found one and went in, we realized the only people inside were men. They looked just as surprised to see two female visitors.

  “As’salam alaikum,” I said. It was a greeting but also a signal that I shared their cultural background. “Wa’alaikum as’salam,” a few replied.

  I tried to break the ice with the serious-looking waiter, asking in Moroccan Arabic if they had some Moroccan pancakes or sfinj, a kind of Moroccan doughnut. He must have been in his twenties, the same age as most of the attackers, and he began to laugh. “I wish I did,” he said. “I can offer you baguette or croissants.”

  “How about Moroccan tea?”

  “That I can do.”

  The TV was on, and a group of men was following a soccer match. When the waiter brought the tea, I told him that I was a journalist and asked him if he knew any of the men who had been involved in “what happened in Paris.”

  “I have only seen them when they used to live here and would stop by for a coffee, or on the streets, but I wasn’t friends with them,” he said.

  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.”