Marseille // In a world without ISIL, Salah Abdeslam’s future might have followed a predictable pattern of crime, drug-taking and jail.
Instead, he became a significant member of what has been called one of the biggest terrorist networks to strike Europe.
His background of delinquency and feckless living is shared by many of his known or presumed accomplices.
Unlike most of them, including his brother Brahim, Abdeslam is still alive — captured four days before the Brussels explosions killed 32 at Zaventem airport and Maalbeek metro station on March 22.
In all, 13 terrorists known to have been attached to the network have been killed since the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015.
Abdeslam’s capture has been followed by the arrests of two key suspects in the Brussels bombings, including his friend and past partner in pretty crime, Mohamed Abrini, 31, a Belgian-Moroccan nicknamed “Brioche” because he once worked in a baker’s shop.
Prosecutors say Abrini has confessed to being the “man in the hat”, the would-be suicide bomber at Brussels airport whose device did not explode, allowing him to escape as his accomplices blew themselves up.
Police have also held a Swedish national, Osama Krayem, 28, the son of Syrian migrants. They are trying to establish whether Krayem is the person seen alongside the metro suicide bomber in surveillance footage from the blast. The bomber, Khalid El Bakraoui, 27, died in the attack. El Bakraoui’s brother, Ibrahim, 29, was one of the two airport attackers who died.
From early questioning of Abrini and Krayem, investigators believe the network was planning further atrocities in France but decided to target Brussels instead as police closed in.
Media reports suggest key Paris targets may have been specifically under threat, including the commercial district of La Defence, and the Euro 2016 football tournament, which is due to be held at several venues across France in June.
Abrini and Krayem are among more than 30 people to have been detained on suspicion of playing active or supporting roles in preparing the Paris and Brussels attacks or later helping those involved. Most were held in France and Belgium though some were arrested in Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and Turkey,
In the cases of many of the bombers and gunmen, there is a proven or suspected link with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, widely seen as the orchestrator of the Paris attacks under instructions or encouragement from ISIL in Syria. Abaaoud, was also a ruthless participant in the carnage of November 13.
But what else is known of this large group of young men – most with criminal records – from the Brussels district of Molenbeek, with its large Moroccan population, and the immigrant-dominated banlieues of France?
How did they make the step from leading worthless lives of banditry or low-level criminality to waging war against innocents in the countries of their birth or upbringing?
Some were friends from childhood, involved in the same scrapes with the law. Others met in prison or after joining ISIL in Syria or Iraq.
After the Paris attacks, in which 130 people died, French president Francois Hollande talked of a plot decided and planned in Syria, organised in Belgium and carried out in France. More recently, officials have admitted that the conspiracy involved more people than originally thought.
Each arrest or shooting of network members has typically yielded crucial evidence that includes the names of associates, whether their involvement turned out to be significant, marginal or impossible to verify.
And network members were numerous and determined enough to shake off the loss of one or more of their number, regrouping and reorganising in readiness for more violence.
Abaaoud was killed as French police stormed his hideout, a flat in the Parisian suburb of Saint Denis, five days after the November 13 attacks. Yet clear links have now been established between events in the French capital and the bombings in Brussels four months later.
There are further connections with a shoot-out in the Belgian city of Verviers in January last year and, less well established, with a series of other terrorist plots, including intended massacres on an Amsterdam-Paris express train and of Catholic worshippers in Paris – both foiled.
Another product of Molenbeek, where his father has a clothes shop and declares himself ashamed of the disgrace his son has brought on the family, Abaaoud seems to have relished his notoriety.
Not all ISIL recruits in Europe are men and women of poor education with limited prospects. But many do follow this path, making up for such deficiencies with streetwise resourcefulness and cunning, excited by the promise of involvement in high-profile violence and persuaded by skilled manipulators that their actions will bring fulfilment and martyrdom.
Those recruits with no criminal background, who abandon seemingly stable lives, tend to be driven by pure fanaticism.
But the hoodlums and gangsters are most commonly inspired by a mixture of macho instincts, a fondness for guns and a deep-seated rage against a society they condemn as racist and discriminatory.
The contrast between the ideological fervour and structural rigour of ISIL figureheads from the Middle East and the convicts and misfits among their European volunteers is striking,
“It’s still poorly explained,” says Bernard Rougier, a French specialist and author on the Arab world. “Certainly, Islamism presents a sort of redemption to cretins like Abaaoud, a narcissistic braggart obsessed with the idea of staging hold-ups in Damascus and unable to speak two phrases in Arabic without laughing.”
The perpetrators of the Paris attacks were low in the ISIL hierarchy, he wrote in Le Pont magazine: “The dirt-shovellers made war on defenceless Parisians to show their value to the high-ups.”
The heavy loss of life in Paris and Brussels, and the likelihood that more attacks can be expected and not always prevented, shows how dangerous these “dirt-shovellers” can be.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae