Planned Spontanaeity

"Two days before the Paris attacks, on 11 November around 19.00 pm, Salah Abdeslam was filmed in a gas station in Ressons… together with a person who has been identified as Mohamed Abrini, born 27 December 1984. The latter was driving the Renault Clio used two days later for committing the attacks. The Investigating Judge has issued a European and International arrest warrant against Mohamed Abrini. He is actively tracked down by Belgian and French police services."

Belgium’s federal prosecutor, December 11, 2015

ON THE RUN: Fugitive Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam and his suspected disguise -- EPA

Police in Europe are on the alert, hoping to detain Salah Abdeslam and his companion, Mohamed Abrini, should they be travelling as a duo, as they did back on the 13th of November, in Paris. He is felt now to be in Morocco, and authorities there are attempting to discover where he might be hiding. Even without his capture and the information that might be gleaned directly from him about the Paris attacks, much is now being revealed of the backstory to that attack, and Salah Abdeslam features hugely in its long preparations.

It may have been Abdelhamid Abaaoud who was the ringleader, but without the preliminary work taken care of by Salah Abdeslam, the three-pronged attack in Paris that night would not have had the success that was realized by the three teams of terrorists who streamed out to impose upon the French capital the worst terrorist attack post-war it might ever have imagined. And most of the perpetrators were French-speaking, born in Europe, raised in Europe, who obviously detested Europe and planned to prove it.

The atrocities might have taken place in November but their planning dated back to August when Salah Abdeslam began his initial preparations and travels around Europe, laying the groundwork for their audacious plot. In the space of three months the man drove thousands of kilometres across Europe's usefully open borders and he took possession of gear, rented cars, booked rooms, scouted out venues and transported people where they were meant to be for a handy launch of the November 13 assaults. 

The assembly of the three teams of suicide bombers and gunmen had plenty in common, aside from their lethal hatred for Europe, and particularly France. Their common language of hatred and jihad was additionally bonded by blood ties, by childhood friendships, by an attraction toward petty crime and the venomous social alienation they lived, where they viewed themselves as outsiders both by preference and by circumstance, to the larger society around them. 

Seven of the ten dead attackers and accomplices have been identified, while three of their number remain without identity, DNA resulting in no matches in criminal databases. Two other attackers, Abdeslam and Mohamed Abrini made themselves scarce and have been hunted ever since, to no avail as yet. In September Salah Abdeslam drove a rented car to Budapest where he picked up two men at the train station. According to Hungarian authorities the two men were among thousands of refugees travelling through the Balkans, both of whom refused to register asylum claims.

Clearly, they had entered Europe for reasons other than to claim asylum. Precisely what many authorities in Europe feared might happen, and clearly reflecting what ISIL spokespeople warned they intended to occur. They were briefly halted at a checkpoint on the border with Austria where two of those in the rental Mercedes held Belgian ID cards that were fake. And they were waved right through. Another month, south in Greece, two additional men with Syrian passports among the throngs of migrants appeared; men who would soon enough blow themselves up in Paris.

Abdeslam drove from Brussels to the suburbs of Paris to buy up detonators from a fireworks specialty store. He rented the Paris rooms that would host the attack teams before they set off to  mount their assaults. Three other attackers drove in from the north and the south, outside Paris. On November 11, Salah along with Mohamed Abrini took part in a final reconnaissance of the target sites. The following day they were again travelling together.

Salah Abdeslam called on his older brother Brahim for assistance; both had close relations with Abaaoud whose younger cousin Hasna Ait Boulhacen blew herself up with a suicide belt when  police closed in on Abaaoud in the days following the atrocities in Paris, where they had hidden themselves away in an apartment in Saint-Denis, an area of France that mirrored Molenbeek in Belgium as a ghetto for disaffected Muslims.

Two French Muslims who left for Syria in 2013, Ismael Omar Mostefai and Samy Amimour were the Bataclan team along with a third attacker, as yet unidentified. The suicide bombers at the Stade de France included Bilal Hadfi and the two who had entered Europe through Greece with their forged passports. The three-man squad that focused on attacking bars and restaurants was comprised of Abaaoud and Brahim Abdeslam wearing explosives, and yet another unidentified man.

It is assumed that Salah Abdeslam, also sporting an explosives vest, might have dropped the bombers off at the stadium. Salah Abdeslam called two friends in Brussels to drive the long distance to pick him up. The bloody success of their rampage done with, a huge victory, celebrated by Islamic State, it seems there was yet another venue that was to have come under attack, on the 18th arrondissement, but in the general melee, it seems it was overlooked.