I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  It’s a paradox many of us in the second generation of Muslim immigrants to Europe have felt. I had called the Moroccan embassy in Brussels after the attacks and asked if they had anybody who was dealing with the Moroccan community or challenges faced by second-generation immigrants. “These terrorists, they weren’t Moroccan,” the person at the embassy told me. “They were French or Belgian citizens.”

  I said that I understood this, but that they were still somehow attached to Morocco through their parents, some of whom had homes and businesses in their country of origin. He was adamant that this wasn’t a Moroccan problem.

  Farid explained that people such as Abaaoud, Abdeslam, and he despised Belgium or France as much as they did Morocco. He said that they had often discussed questions of identity, home, and relationships with their families.

  “They all treat us bad. In fact, the people in Morocco and other Arab countries will treat the white man or woman better than they will treat people like you and me,” he said. Farid recalled colonial times, and how France and other European powers never discussed “the crimes they have committed in those countries.” His father and his friends had worked very hard and helped to build Belgium, but they hadn’t made enough money for a decent living, he said. “My parents are getting eight hundred euros and have to pay rent and all other things. After working over thirty-five years in a job Belgians didn’t want to do, that’s all my father gets.” He told me that he’d sworn he wouldn’t let the Belgians take advantage of him.

  I agreed that our parents’ generation had mainly worked in physically demanding jobs in Europe. “But what would they have done if they’d stayed in Morocco?” I asked.

  “Nothing, of course. What could they have done in Morocco? In Morocco, you become something only if you come from one of those famous and very rich families. Don’t you think I’m right?”

  The more I listened, the more it sounded as if he saw himself as everyone’s victim. I told him that I share certain frustrations about Morocco, that I had not come from one of those famous and very rich families, as he called them, and that I also felt that sometimes I wasn’t fully accepted by one side or the other. But that wasn’t a reason to join ISIS.

  “You mean the dawla?” he asked, using an Arabic word favored by ISIS sympathizers that means “the state.” “The caliphate?”

  I nodded. He seemed familiar with the ideology.

  “I admire al-Baghdadi and all the brothers there, they are real good Muslims,” he said. “They are finally the ones who show these pigs in the West that Muslims are no longer victims.”

  I needed to challenge his victimization narrative. I told him that from my understanding, Abdeslam and Abaaoud had dealt drugs and committed robberies. How did this fit into his idea of being a good and innocent Muslim?

  “This society deserves it,” he shot back. “They are all racist, and people like us have no other choice. If you apply for a job and your address says Molenbeek and your name is Arabic, you won’t get it.” It was the same complaint I had heard in the banlieues outside Paris.

  I asked Farid whether he’d gone to school.

  “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 François 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?”

  “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,” Soni
a 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.”

  But Aitboulahcen had grown fascinated by Hayat Boumeddiene, the wife of the kosher supermarket shooter Amedy Coulibaly. Boumeddiene was “her role model,” Sonia told me. When the Paris attacks happened, Aitboulahcen didn’t respond with sorrow or outrage. Instead, she asked Sonia to straighten her hair so that she could go out.

  “They’re all unbelievers,” she said of the victims, Sonia recalled. “Nothing can happen to me.”

  She remained casual and seemingly unaffected until Sunday evening, November 15, when she and members of her surrogate family returned home after a walk through Saint-Denis. Then Aitboulahcen’s cell phone lit up. The number on the screen started with the country code for Belgium.

  But Aitboulahcen did not recognize the number, Sonia recalled, and didn’t believe the man on the other end of the line when he said he was calling on behalf of her cousin. She hung up. But the phone rang again.

  “I’m not going to explain everything: you saw what happened on TV,” the caller said. She was then instructed to find a hiding place for her cousin, “for no more than a day or two.”

  A switch seemed to flip in Aitboulahcen’s mind. She began to believe that this might really be someone calling on behalf of her cousin, and Sonia said she seemed thrilled. “Tell me what I have to do,” Aitboulahcen said eagerly.

  Sonia later told police that at the time even Aitboulahcen was unsure which cousin needed her help. Both women wondered if it was actually Abaaoud’s younger brother—the one he’d kidnapped and taken to Syria several years earlier. The boy was thought to be dead, but in the chaos of the caliphate anything was possible.

  “She hung up and told me her little cousin from Syria was here, sixteen-year-old Younes,” Sonia said. “I told her we were going to get him but that if he was injured we would take him to the hospital. And that if he’d done something wrong, I’d take him to the cops.… I said to myself, I can’t leave a sixteen-year-old outside in the cold. I have a son the same age.”