FILE – In this Friday Nov. 13, 2015 file photo a victim under a blanket lays dead outside the Bataclan theater in Paris. Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the 10-man Islamic State cell that attacked Paris in November 2015, is going on trial on Monday, Feb. 5, 2018 in Belgium. The trial covers a shootout that led to his capture in March 2016. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)
PARIS – He is the silent survivor of the 10-man Islamic State cell that terrorized Paris in November 2015, refusing all pleas to shed light on the attack that killed 130 people in the French capital or the one in Belgium four days after his arrest.
After spending nearly three years jailed in isolation, Salah Abdeslam is set to go on trial Monday in his hometown of Brussels for a police shootout that he himself fled. The man who covered for his getaway with a spray of automatic gunfire died. Abdeslam’s escape was short-lived – he was captured on March 18, 2016, in the same neighborhood where he and many of his Islamic State fighter colleagues grew up.
Four days later, Islamic State suicide attackers struck again, this time at the Brussels airport and subway. In all, that sprawling network of IS fighters killed 162 people in the two European capitals. 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 two of the deadliest terror attacks in Europe since World War II.
The operational commander of the cell was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a petty criminal who used his home neighborhood of Molenbeek in Brussels as a fertile recruiting ground for the Islamic State. Abaaoud even recruited his 14-year-old brother. But many of the young men who followed him into ISIS were small-time 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. She was happy to help. She called her dealer. He called another dealer.
For 150 euros ($187) wired from Belgium, they secured a room near the national stadium they had attacked on Nov. 13.
In the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 18, frantic French investigators tipped off by a friend of Ait Belkacem tracked them to the building. Abaaoud, Ait Belkacem and Akrouh all died when Akrouh detonated a suicide vest.
At their trial, fellow dealer Mohammed Soumah explained how he framed the world: “Me, I don’t fit in the terrorist box. I’m a thug, a scumbag,” Soumah told the judge. But there he was sitting in the box for terrorism defendants in central Paris alongside Bendaoud.
As for why neither man made the connection between the two Belgians desperate for a hideout amid a massive police manhunt and an outpouring of grief for France’s 130 victims, Soumah had another explanation.
“The criminal life goes on,” he said.
