Islamic State’s intersection of crime, terror
Trial to illustrate how group has leaned on the skills of criminals in its terror plots
PARIS — He is the mute survivor of the 10-man Islamic State cell that terrorized Paris in November 2015, refusing all pleas to shed light on the attack that left 130 dead or another one in Brussels just four days after his arrest.
After nearly three years jailed in isolation and silence, Salah Abdeslam goes on trial Monday in his hometown of Brussels for a police shootout that he fled. The man who covered for his getaway with gunfire died. Abdeslam’s escape was short-lived — he was captured on March 18, 2016, in the same Brussels neighbourhood where he and many of his Islamic State fighter colleagues had grown up.
Four days later, Islamic State suicide attackers struck again, this time at the Brussels airport and subway. In all, that sprawling network of ISIL fighters killed 162 people. Most of the extremists were French speakers, raised in one of the cities they struck. The plot’s execution depended upon Islamic State’s success in wedding crime and religion.
Abdeslam, who along with his brother was suspected of dealing drugs from the bar they ran, is the starkest example of that convergence. But in Paris, the trial of three men accused of giving safe haven to the attackers also provides a revealing look at the intersection that made possible the deadliest terror attacks in Europe since the Second World War.
The operational commander of the cell was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a petty criminal who used his neighbourhood of Molenbeek in Brussels as a recruiting ground for ISIL. Abaaoud even recruited his younger brother, then 14. But many of the young men who followed him into ISIL were smalltime criminals themselves, part of the extremist organization’s deliberate attempt to make use of “skills” that include accessing black market weapons, forging documents and handling covert logistics.
When the night of carnage in Paris — Nov. 13, 2015 — was finally over, seven attackers were dead and three were on the run: Abdeslam, Abaaoud and another Molenbeek native named Chakib Akrouh. Abdeslam called friends in Brussels to drive through the night and pick him up. Abaaoud also called his cousin, Hasna Ait Belkacem, who lived in a suburb of Paris and vacillated between hard-line Islam and even harder drug use. She was happy to help. She called her dealer. He called another dealer.
For 150 euros ($187) wired from Belgium, they secured a room in the Paris neighbourhood of Saint-Denis, near the national stadium they had attacked on Nov. 13. In the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 18, investigators tipped off by a friend of Ait Belkacem tracked them to the building and sealed off the neighbourhood. Abaaoud, Ait Belkacem and Akrouh all died when Akrouh detonated a suicide vest.
But the lines between terrorists and criminals are less clear now than ever, said Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization.
“ISIS is perhaps the first jihadist group that has explicitly targeted this demographic, and they’ve done it very consciously and especially in Europe,” he said. “What we saw in Brussels and Paris — this is not an isolated case. This is actually reflecting the situation across Europe. If you go to Sweden, Norway, Holland, Germany, they will all tell you that 50 per cent plus of the people who have turned up travelling to Syria or involved in domestic plots have previous criminal convictions, often for petty crime.”