The world watches in horror as alleged gunman Amedy Coulilaby who armed with an Ak-47 gunned down and killed a French policewoman and is now holding Jewish hostages inside a kosher store in Paris. This taking place on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo attack, in which the satirical staff of that publication were gunned down in cold blood in what appeared to be a highly organized and well-planned attack. While it may look to the witnessing world like these terrorists emerged out of nowhere or are the work of new terrorist groups such as ISIS, these terrorist actors have a long legacy of militant jihadi thinking and have built their ideology, groups and recruitment strategies upon years of terrorist activities in Belgium, the UK and France.
Indeed the roots of the Charlie Hebdo attacks appear to reach all the way back to Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada’s hateful preaching and terrorist incitement based out of the Finsbury Park Mosque in the nineties. Morton Storm, a Danish extremist turned undercover was radicalized by the same al Qaeda mouthpieces, as was Richard Reid and Sajajid Badat, the two so called “shoe bombers”. Abu Hamza will finally be sentenced this Friday in New York after being convicted last year of eleven charges of instigating terrorist acts. This after years of legal wrangling that allowed him to incite terrorism openly on the streets of what many were referring to as “Londonstan”. Abu Qatada, the Jordanian born “spiritual leader” of al Qaeda’s European operations was extradited back to Jordan in 2013 after a long legal battle in the UK.
Djamal Beghal, now fifty, is an Algerian who lived both in the UK and France was one of their disciples and “grew up” to become a terrorist instigator himself. In 2001, immediately following the 9-11 attacks, police in Belgium and Netherlands raided addresses linked to Beghal. He was arrested and found responsible for organizing a soon to be carried out suicide bombing attack sending Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian living in Belgium to blow himself up in U.S. Embassy Paris among other plots. Included in his heinous list of plots for the cells Beghal had set up in Britian, Germany, Belgium, France and Spain, was a plot to kill President Bush and other G8 leaders by crashing an airliner into the G8 summit held in Genoa, Italy and attacking an American base in Belgium. Beghal was released from prison in 2010, but then rearrested in May of 2011 for allegedly directing a terrorist group. It now appears that Cherif Kouachi—the alleged shooter in the Charlie Hebdo attacks—was among his adherents.
French-Algerian Cherif Kouachi—the alleged shooter in the Charlie Hebdo attacks was jailed in 2008 in France for arranging for jihadists to travel to Iraq to fight the U.S. led invasion of Iraq. Kouachi met Beghal in French prison. Upon their release the two regularly met with other formerly convicted and also released terrorists including Ahmed Laidouni—a jihadi recruiter, and Farid Meouk—an Algerian member of the GIA terror group. The Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM) that emerged out of the GIA had ties that crossed between Morocco and Algeria and Belgian and French citizens of Algerian and Moroccan descent. That group ultimately pledged its allegiance to Osama bin Ladin and became Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM). The GICM was associated with the May 2003 suicide attacks in Casa Blanca and an offshoot of that group—Salafia Jihadia—was blamed for the 2004 attack on public transportation in Madrid that killed 191 and wounded 1900.
So we see that homegrown terrorism directed and linked to the group and ideology of al Qaeda active via Muslims of immigrant descent or first generation immigrants themselves, living in Europe have been active and brewing for a long time. And now with the viral power of the ISIS meme is likely to be with us for quite some time.
Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. is Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University in the School of Medicine and of Security Studies in the School of Foreign Service She is author of Talking to Terrorists and coauthor of Undercover Jihadi. She was responsible for designing the psychological and Islamic challenge aspects of the Detainee Rehabilitation Program in Iraq to be applied to twenty thousand detainees and eight hundred juveniles. She also has interviewed over four hundred terrorists, their family members and supporters in various parts of the world including Gaza, the West Bank, Chechnya, Iraq, Jordan and many countries in Europe.
Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. 