By Aramie Louisville Vas
What an interesting thing an article in transit is! In the middle of reporting to our readers that a suspected planner of the Paris bombings, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was bragging about his lack of difficulty in crossing over borders of Europe, it also became our duty to report that that same terror suspect was dead, killed yesterday in a raid on a French apartment building in Saint-Denis.
Despite previous difficulty in tracking him down, on Wednesday the French military staged a seven-hour assault on the apartment where Abaaoud was thought to be hiding. They weren’t planning to let him out alive. Over 5,000 rounds of ammunition were fired during the siege. Two people were killed: one woman who reportedly blew herself up with a suicide vest, and one other person whose body was riddled with bullets, confirmed by French authorities to be Abaaoud.
I can’t tell you I feel special glee over anyone’s death, not even the death of a suspected terrorist and murderer. But I can tell you that Abaaoud spent most of last year on Europe’s Most Wanted lists, boasting about impending attacks on the Continent with a terrible air of conceit that he was an Allah class pet because he hadn’t, so far, been caught.
Abaaoud was 28 years old, Moroccan-born and raised in Belgium. The area in Brussels where he grew up is economically poor and radical ideology has a stronghold for some. The Belgian contingent taking up arms to fight for Daesh was large (about 350 people) and Abaaoud became one of the most well-known. In July, he was convicted in absentia for organizing terrorism following a January raid on a terror cell he had organized in Verviers. In February, Abaaoud spoke to an English-language magazine produced by Daesh regarding the time he spent in Syria planning the Verviers cell:
“I suddenly saw my picture all over the media, but Alhamdulillah (thanks be to God), the kuffar (infidels) were blinded by Allah. I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance,” said Abaaoud. “This was nothing but a gift from Allah.”
So many different ways to see a god.
It is fairly shocking that Abaaoud and his accomplices were able to travel about Europe even though authorities knew his face and knew he was a Daesh militant. Abaaoud was even featured in a video, often re-posted, which showed him driving a pickup truck full of bloodied bodies killed by Daesh. The footage was obtained by independent journalists in 2014.
“Before we towed jet skis, motorcycles, quad bikes, big trailers filled with gifts for vacation in Morocco,” said Abaaoud on-camera. “Now, thank God, following God’s path, we’re towing apostates, infidels who are fighting us.”
The fact that Abaaoud, and many others, were not noticed and captured sooner have led to discussion about the necessity for biometric passports which would include security measure such as iris scans and fingerprints to better detect who’s who as they cross over European borders. It would seem that sooner is better to implement this plan, as Abaaoud was not the only militant laughing at the ease with which they were able to move from place to place and set up shop for terror.
Abaaoud’s father is Omar Abaaoud, whose own father arrived in Belgium from Morocco four decades ago to work in the coal mines. Omar told Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws in January after the Verviers raid:
“We had a good, I’d say a fantastic life. Abdelhamid wasn’t a difficult child and a good manager. But then he all of a sudden left for Syria.
“I think about why he left every day and why he turned so incredibly radical at such short notice. There will never be a real answer … I don’t understand why he wanted to attack Belgium. Our family owes everything to this country.”