4 ISIS agents’ path to Europe
Posing as migrants from Syria, 2 later joined Paris attack
SALZBURG, Austria — On a crisp morning last October, 198 migrants arrived on the Greek island of Leros, all of them seemingly desperate people seeking sanctuary in Europe. But hiding among them were four men with a very different agenda.
The four were posing as war-weary Syrians — all carrying doctored passports with false identities. And they were on a deadly mission for the Islamic State.
Two of the four would masquerade as migrants all the way to Paris. There, at 9:20 p.m. on Nov. 13, they would detonate suicide vests near the Stade de France sports complex, fulfilling their part in the worst attack on French soil since World War II.
The other two men would not make it that far.
Stopped upon arrival in Greece for lying about their identities, they were delayed — but only for a few weeks before being granted permission to continue their journey deeper into Europe. Their story — including key details never before disclosed — offers a cautionary tale for a continent suddenly facing its worst security threat since the end of the Cold War. The men’s journey from the battlefields of Syria was reconstructed through interviews with intelligence officials and from French investigative documents obtained by the Washington Post, as well as an interview with a commander of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
European security officials say they believe ISIS has seeded terror cells on the continent over the past year and was able to do so in part because the European Union failed to come to grips with a migrant crisis that opened a funnel for the militant group.
Europe is now working with Turkey to bar its doors, ending the waves of irregular migration that washed over the continent last year. But more than a million migrants — a record — have already entered. Hundreds of thousands of them, European intelligence agencies say, may have done so without thorough checks at their entry point: Greece.
The vast majority of migrants were genuinely fleeing war and poverty. But, over the past six months, more than three dozen suspected militants who impersonated migrants have been arrested or died while planning or carrying out acts of terror. They include at least seven directly tied to the attacks in Paris and Brussels.
ISIS is gloating that far more are lying in wait.
“Wehave sent many operatives to Europe with the refugees,” a ISIS commander said in an interview over an encrypted data ser- vice. “Some of our brothers have fulfilled their mission, but others are still waiting to be activated.”
The accounts of the two men who landed in Leros with plans to die in France, only to stop short of their goal, expose the weaknesses in a haphazard system that has created risks of unknown dimensions.
“The Greeks failed in protecting the borders into the EU,” said a senior European intelligence official who, along with 11 other senior European, U.S. and Arab officials interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss classified information. “And we all failed by not pushing hard enough to establish that security.”
AAA In early September, the four men were invited to attend a secret meeting in a central Syrian city controlled by ISIS. Two of them — the ones who would blow themselves up outside the Stade de France — were later glorified in an Islamic State video as unnamed militants from Iraq. The other two men were Mohamed Usman, a Pakistani who claims to be 23 years old, and Adel Haddadi, a 28-year-old Algerian.
Usman and Haddadi had joined the Islamic State in 2014, the men would tell European investigators. In Syria, they received extensive training with automatic weapons, but neither was a stranger to extremism.
Haddadi had previously been on the watch lists of Algerian intelligence for his activities; Usman was suspected of links to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a radical Pakistani terror group tied to the 2008 siege of Mumbai, according to two senior European security officials.
At the meeting in the living room of a home, according to their accounts, a senior Islamic State official told them that the time had come to leave the Caliphate.
“You are on a mission to go to France, to kill, to become a mar- tyr,” an ISIS commander told them, according to their testimony, which was cited by a European security official. The men, in interviews with European investigators, would later recall an intense sense of pride at being picked for such a mission.
To get as far as Leros, the four men were spirited out of Syria and into Turkey, where they made their way to the coast. From there, they told investigators, they took a smuggler’s raft laden with migrants. The numbers of arrivals were so large, in the thousands per day, that Greece could not handle the caseloads.
Frontex, the EU’s border agency, provided some preliminary vetting. But managing the masses was largely left to the overwhelmed Greek Coast Guard and to local island police.
Many of the new arrivals — particularly Syrians fleeing war — had no passports or legal travel documents at all. Yet European intelligence agencies and security analysts now estimate that up until the Paris attacks in November, only about 20 percent of the new arrivals were being thoroughly questioned and checked.
AAA On the morning of Oct. 3, the four terrorists tried to blend in with the migrants who had come ashore that day. According to a manifest, they were among at least 47 asylum seekers who said they were Syrians fleeing war.
When their turn came, the two Iraqi militants showed authorities doctored Syrian passports, according to the classified French files. Remains of the documents found near their bodies at the Stade de France suggested they had come from a cache of more than 3,800 passports — all authentic — seized by ISIS after its major advances in Syria in 2013.
While the passports had been tampered with to insert new photographs, they otherwise appeared real to the eye and touch. The men’s claims of being Syrian asylum seekers were not seriously questioned by Frontex or the Greeks. They were not detained and merely told to leave Greece within six months.
Classified records show the Iraqis — who still have not been identified — then quickly traveled over land to Serbia, where they registered at a refugee camp in Presevo on Oct. 7. By November, they had linked up with the other assailants in the Paris attacks.
On Nov. 13, they became the only non-European born attackers to take part in a series of assaults that saw nine men kill 130 people at different locations in Paris. But that day, what was nine assailants might have been 11, possibly leading to even more victims but for the grace of a few extra questions in Leros.
Like the two Iraqis, Usman and Haddadi also produced falsified Syrian documents. But when questioned by Frontex, the two men, unlike the Iraqis, crumbled.
Usman, a Pakistani, did not speak Arabic well. Haddadi knew almost nothing about his supposed birthplace — Aleppo, Syria.
Under EU guidelines, the most the European border agency could do was pass them on to the Greeks. So that’s what they did, and the local authorities promptly lumped them in with a then-surging backlog of economic migrants who were using fake documents to enter the asylum system.
Both men were transferred to the larger Greek island of Kos. In what became a customary practice in Greece, Usman and Haddadi received suspended threemonth sentences along with an order to leave the country within a month. It didn’t matter how or which way they went.
After gaining their freedom on Oct. 28, Haddadi, the more senior of the two, quickly sent a text via the messaging app WhatsApp to their ISIS handler in Syria.
“We need money,” it simply said, according to intelligence officials with access to the pair’s phone records.
That money soon arrived via a wire from Turkey to Greece. Now flush with cash, the two men embarked on a trek through the western Balkans. They knew their destination was France, but the men said they had not been given precise instructions on when or where the attacks would unfold. They also were unaware of the identities of the other Paris attackers besides the two Iraqi militants they had traveled with. They were to get further instructions along the way.
The Islamic State commander who spoke to The Post said that was the way the group was seeking to operate. “The cells don’t necessarily know one another; that’s to protect other operatives,” he said. “So even if one or two get arrested, they won’t be able to lead to other operatives, because they don’t know them. We are not finished yet with Europe, since they didn’t seem to have understood our warnings.”
The men entered Austria without passports and offering fake names, while this time claiming to be from their real countries. On Dec. 4, both men applied for asylum in Austria, and took up residence in a refugee center.
European authorities had immediately launched a massive investigation following the Paris attacks, and were beginning to retrace the attackers’ steps. With the aid of German and U.S. intelligence, a manifest of the day’s migrant arrivals — including photos — was run through databases and a face-recognition system of known radicals and Islamic State militants, according to a senior European intelligence official.
The searches returned two hits. On Dec. 10, Austrian police tracked them down to the center and arrested them. They are now being held at an undisclosed jail in Austria. Officials expect the two men will ultimately stand trial in connection with the Paris attacks.