Turkey Blames Islamic State in Istanbul Attack

Blue Mosque (Istanbul) inscription (Credit: Photo by author)
Blue Mosque (Istanbul) inscription
(Credit: Photo by author)

ISTANBUL, Jan 12 —An Islamic State suicide bomber struck Istanbul’s historic district Tuesday, killing at least 10 people in a blow to Turkey’s vital tourism industry that comes as the U.S. and its allies are stepping up their campaign against the extremists.

The bomber—identified by Turkish authorities as a Syrian citizen born in 1988—walked up to a foreign tour group preparing to visit the Blue Mosque and other world-renowned buildings and detonated the explosives shortly after 10 a.m., officials said. At least eight of those killed and nine of the injured were from Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policy for Syrian refugees has come under increasing fire.

Turkey and the U.S. are developing new plans to choke off Islamic State supply routes by clamping down on a vital 60-mile stretch of the Turkey-Syria border, which the militants use to transport weapons, supplies and fighters in and out of their Syrian strongholds.

Ankara has asked the Pentagon to arm and train Turkish-backed Arab militants in Syria to help control their side of the border, officials said yesterday. U.S. officials say they are considering the request.

Islamic State, which has sought to extend its reach globally, has responded to the pressure by staging deadly attacks around the world, including two suicide bombings in Ankara in October that killed more than 100 people.

Tuesday’s attack may signal a new attempt by the Sunni Muslim extremist group to destabilize Turkey by targeting a crucial industry. Famously straddling the narrow Bosporus Strait between Asia and Europe, Istanbul is the world’s fifth most popular city for tourists world-wide and the third most visited in Europe after Paris and London, according to MasterCard Inc. ’s global destinations index. Some 32 million tourists visit Turkey annually, with Istanbul recording 12 million arrivals last year.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. But Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the bomber belonged to Islamic State.

“This attack is a repercussion on Turkey of the civil war that has been going on in Syria for five years, and its related proxy wars,” said Numan Kurtulmus, Turkey’s deputy prime minister.

Firas Abi Ali, a senior analyst with IHS Country Risk, described the Islamic State attack as a risky strategic shift that would “herald a broader campaign against Turkey” and “will likely provoke a significant backlash by the Turkish government.”

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged to press on with the fight. “Turkey is the primary target for all terrorist organizations active in the region,” he said. “Turkey will continue its determined and principled fight against terrorism until the very end.”

The German chancellor expressed her condolences to the victims’ loved ones and urged solidarity with Turkey. “Let us not forget the people in Turkey, who again and again have become targets of terror,” Ms. Merkel said.

More than 400,000 Syrians arrived in Germany last year to apply for asylum, according to government figures, part of a massive wave of migrants who crossed into Europe via Turkey.

Critics say last year’s uncontrolled migration has exposed Europe to heightened security risks, and opponents of Ms. Merkel’s welcoming policy have highlighted the possibility of Islamic State militants entering among the refugees.

Eyewitnesses and Turkish officials said the bomber appeared to target the group gathered near an ancient Egyptian obelisk, close to the entrance to the Blue Mosque compound.

“It was a single, very loud blast,” said Mahmut Karademir, a restaurant worker near the blast site. “Then people started running for their lives.”

Berlin-based Lebenslust Touristik GmbH said members of one of its tour groups were among the dead and injured.

“These are difficult hours for all of us,” said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. “Hours of mourning, of anger, and of outrage.”

Tourism makes up around 4% of Turkey’s economy and generated close to $30 billion last year, according to the government’s investment-promotion agency. Istanbul alone generated a third of that total.

Olivier Jager, chief executive of Forward Data SL, a tourism consultancy, said such attacks typically “trigger immediate travel cancellations, followed by lower volumes of new booking during some time,” a trend shown after the deadly attacks in Paris last year and a related security crackdown in Brussels.

“The time necessary for recovery will depend on the ability of the Turkish authorities to reassure leisure travelers that visiting Istanbul is safe,” said Mr. Jager.

The industry is already struggling to deal with a steep decline in Russian tourists after Turkish jets shot down a Russian warplane carrying out airstrikes along the Turkey-Syria border last fall.

Russia imposed various sanctions in response, including banning charter flights.

Mr. Kurtulmus, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, said Turkey had been systematically targeted since the July 20 bombing in the southeastern town of Suruç.

That attack, linked to Islamic State, killed 33 peace activists as they prepared to cross the border to the Syrian city of Kobani, where U.S.-backed Kurdish militants had just ousted Islamic State fighters.

Turkey soon found itself in a two-front war against Islamic State and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has been fighting for Kurdish autonomy for decades. Both groups are designated by Ankara and its Western allies as terrorist organizations.

With the peace process between Turkey and its Kurds stalled, the PKK and its affiliates have led an urban uprising in Turkey’s southeast.

They targeted a police station in Istanbul in a deadly assault in August, and claimed a mortar attack on the smaller of Istanbul’s two airports in December.

Ankara has responded by opening its air bases for U.S.-led coalition forces fighting Islamic State, launching limited airstrikes on the jihadist organization in Syria and on PKK camps in northern Iraq, and launching military operations against Kurdish insurgents in southeastern Turkey.

But the campaigns have failed to halt the death toll, as soldiers and police are killed battling the PKK, Kurdish separatists are killed by the dozens and civilians get caught in the crossfire.
—Emre Peker and Anton Troianovski in Berlin contributed to this article

Suicide bomber kills at least 15 outside Pakistan polio center

Attack on Quetta polio center (Credit: youtube.com)
Attack on Quetta polio center
(Credit: youtube.com)

Quetta, Jan 12: A suicide bomber killed at least 15 people, most of them police, outside a polio eradication center in the Pakistani city of Quetta on Wednesday, the latest militant attack on the anti-polio campaign in the country.

Two militant groups – the Pakistani Taliban and Jundullah, which has links with the Taliban and has pledged allegiance to Islamic State – separately claimed responsibility for the attack.

The bomb blew up a police van that had just arrived at the center to provide an escort for workers in a drive to immunize all children under five years old in the poor southwestern province of Baluchistan.

“It was a suicide blast, we have gathered evidence from the scene,” Ahsan Mehboob, the provincial police chief told Reuters.

“The police team had arrived to escort teams for the polio campaign.”

Ahmed Marwat, who identified himself as a commander and spokesman for Jundullah, said his group was responsible.

“We claim the bomb blast on the polio office. In the coming days, we will make more attacks on polio vaccination offices and polio workers,” he said by telephone.

The Pakistani Taliban also claimed responsibility in a statement released by their spokesman, Mohammad Khorasani.

Teams in Pakistan working to immunize children against the virus are often targeted by Taliban and other militant groups, who say the campaign is a cover for Western spies, or accuse workers of distributing drugs designed to sterilize children.

The latest attack killed at least 12 policemen, one paramilitary officer and two civilians, officials said. Twenty-five people were wounded.

Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where polio remains endemic, the World Health Organization says.

The campaign to eradicate the virus in Pakistan has had some recent success, with new cases down last year, but violence against vaccination workers has slowed the effort.

(Reporting by Gul Yousafzai and Syed Raza Hassan; Additional reporting by Saud Mehsud in Dera Ismail Khan and Jibran Ahmed in Peshawar; Writing by Tommy Wilkes; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore, Robert Birsel)

MQM Distances itself from Dr Imran Farooq’s Assassins

ISLAMABAD, Jan 8: Two men suspected of being involved in the murder of Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s self-exiled leader Dr Imran Farooq recorded their confessional statements before the Islamabad deputy commissioner on Thursday, sources said.

The FIA had arrested three suspects — Khalid Shamim, Mohsin Ali Syed and Moazzam Ali — for their alleged role in Dr Farooq’s murder.

While Shamim and Mohsin Ali confessed to their involvement, Moazzam Ali, said to be the prime suspect, was unwilling to come up with a confession, sources in the prosecution told Dawn.

In his statement recorded under Section 164 of the criminal procedure code, Mohsin said that Moazzam had handled the travel documents to live in the United Kingdom.
According to private news channel Geo News, Mohsin in his statement gave graphic details of the murder.

He said that at a university hostel in London he and his accomplice Kashif Khan Kamran, whose whereabouts are not known and may have died, prepared a plot to kill Dr Farooq.

He said they monitored the movement of Dr Farooq in London to know about his routine.

On the day of the murder, he said, he grabbed Dr Farooq while Kashif stabbed him and then bludgeoned him with a brick to ensure his death.

Shamim said that he had consented to join the murder plot because he was a diehard MQM activist, sources said.

Shamim claimed that senior MQM leader Muhammad Anwar gave the order to assassinate Dr Farooq.

The JIT constituted to investigate the murder had suggested that MQM chief Altaf Hussain regarded Dr Farooq as a threat and wanted him eliminated.

The JIT report also noted that all three suspects were members of the All Pakistan Muttahida Students Organisation, the MQM’s student wing.

The suspects were sent to Adiyala jail on 14-day judicial remand by an Islamabad anti-terrorism court.

The gruesome murder took place on Sept 16, 2010, near Dr Farooq’s London home.

The London police had named Mohsin Ali Syed and Mohammad Kashif Khan Kamran as wanted men in connection with the murder as they were in the UK when Dr Farooq was murdered. They arrested the three men during the last five years but released them later without filing any charges.

However, it was widely reported that both Mohsin and Kamran had been taken into custody by Pakistani intelligence agents the moment they landed at Karachi airport in 2010.

The third suspect, Khalid Shamim, was allegedly taken into custody in January 2011 and a petition regarding his ‘illegal detention and going missing’ was filed by his wife in the Sindh High Court.

In March last year, Moazzam was arrested at his Azizabad house for facilitating the suspects in getting a British visa.

On June 18, 2015, the Frontier Corps claimed to have arrested Mohsin and Shamim in Chaman in Balochistan.

The FC claimed that the two were illegally entering Pakistan from Afghanistan.

On Dec 5, 2015 — the day Karachi went to the local government polls — the FIA registered a murder case against MQM chief Altaf Hussain, his nephew Iftikhar Hussain, Moazzam Ali Khan, Khalid Shamim, Kashif Khan Kamran and Syed Mohsin Ali.

MQM’s reaction
Meanwhile, the MQM made it clear that none of its workers had anything to do with the assassination of Dr Farooq.

“The MQM is aware of reports in the media that individuals held in detention by Pakistani authorities have allegedly confessed to the murder of Dr Imran Farooq. We categorically state that no party personnel have had anything whatsoever to do with the tragic death of Dr Farooq. We mourn the loss of a man who was our friend and colleague for many years,” said a statement issued in Karachi on Thursday evening.
Published in Dawn, January 8th, 2016

The Child Martyrs of Pakistan

APS anniversary (Credit: newsonetv)
APS anniversary
(Credit: newsonetv)

LAHORE, Pakistan — A FEW days after the Pakistani Taliban gunned down 14-year-old Muhammad Shaheer Khan, along with at least 144 others, at the Army Public School in Peshawar last year, his mother received the black gloves he had worn to school that day.

“It was cold,” she told me, about the last morning she had seen him.

It was cold, too, on the night we met, earlier this week. We were sitting on the roof of the home of a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Aurangzeb, whose son was also massacred.

Mr. Aurangzeb has created an open-air room on his rooftop that functions as a shrine to his son and a gathering place for other mourning parents, who meet there twice a week. A poster of the photos of the murdered, mostly schoolchildren, runs the length of one wall. Green banners inscribed with Quranic verses hang on another.

It was two days before Dec. 16, the anniversary of the massacre, and six couples — bundled in overcoats, woolen scarves covering their mouths — had assembled.

When she received the black gloves, Muhammad Shaheer’s mother said, she asked her maid to wash them. “Suddenly, the maid cried, ‘There is blood in these!’ so I rushed to see. Blood was leaking from inside the gloves. I told the maid to get aside,” she said. “I will wash the gloves myself. This is my child’s blood, my own blood.” She touched her stomach. “You see, when my child was shot, he must have put his hand on his stomach to ease the pain.”

The other mothers mechanically wiped away tears.

“So I washed them myself, and the whole tub was filled with blood,” she said. “Then I took the bloodied water and watered my plants with it. It is my blood, so it will stay in my home.”

“But my tears have dried up,” her husband said. He is short and stocky, and introduced himself as a businessman. “Will you please let me talk for five minutes?” he asked, dragging a plastic chair closer to where I was sitting. “No one should interrupt me.”

“What has the government done for us? They have only given us medals. And these medals have gone black, just like their hearts. What operation is the Army doing? Which terrorists are they hanging? Why don’t they show us the photos of the dead terrorists? I would like the government to hang them in the square of this city, so I can go and spit on them. When my child and the children of these parents were killed, they took them to the hospital in Suzuki vans like cut-up pieces of meat.”

He pointed at our host. “Mr. Aurangzeb, here, his son called him from his cellphone after he was shot, to say: ‘Baba, bring me water. I am feeling thirsty.’ His father rushed to the school with two guns in his hands to kill the terrorists himself but he was not allowed in. Please excuse my language — I should not be using this word in front of women — but what have these bastards done for us other than give us rusting medals?”

In the years leading up to the massacre, a debate raged in Pakistan: Are the Taliban our enemies or are they “misguided” Muslims?

Increasingly, the latter narrative was winning out. Its greatest proponent was Imran Khan, the cricket star-turned-politician, who insisted that the government engage the Taliban in peace talks instead of hunting them down because they were “our people, Pakistanis.” The Taliban have historic grievances with the United States, the argument went, and Pakistan is caught in the middle because of its greed for American dollars. The Taliban don’t hate us — they just hate our government’s foreign policy.

The Taliban, energized by the government’s willful impotence, began to kill with impunity. In the last 10 years, more than 50,000 Pakistani civilians — innocent men, women and children — perished in the war on terror.

Then the Taliban attacked the Army Public School on Dec. 16, 2014. For years, Pakistan’s security establishment had resisted decisively moving against the Taliban; it had, in fact, nurtured some of these terrorists as assets in Afghanistan. But now the army was humiliated — an army school had been attacked, army children killed. Suddenly, the Taliban were not misguided Muslims. They were murderers. Politicians, who had previously described the terrorists in painstakingly diplomatic terms, began to curse them. The Pakistani mind-set, which had veered from lamentation (when the Taliban attacks began) to fear (when high-profile politicians began to be assassinated) to denial (when “talks” gained traction) had changed: The people were now angry.

Significantly, the establishment delicately altered the notion of martyrdom. The word for martyr in Urdu is “shaheed.” To achieve martyrdom — or shahaadat — is to be elevated to the highest ranks in heaven for a patriotic sacrifice made on earth. The word had been reserved for Pakistani soldiers killed in war. Now schoolchildren and teachers who had been killed as they sat peacefully in an auditorium were all shaheed, because the Army said so. The message was this: Our children did not die in vain; they are the reason we have gone after the people’s enemy.

Today, a year has passed. The Army Public School has undergone intensive renovation. Brass plaques inscribed with buoyant religious verses adorn the grounds. New vigor has been applied to the operation against the Pakistani Taliban in the mountains of Waziristan. The names of dead terrorists routinely appear as front-page news.

But on the Aurangzebs’ rooftop, the posters of dead children flutter in the wind. The parents, who still feel that far too little has been done, cling to their memories. “My son used to bathe so well, so well,” says Muhammad Shaheer’s mother, “that when he would come out of the shower, shining white, we would say, ‘Look, it’s Katrina Kaif!’ ” — a Bollywood actress.

Another mother looks me in the eye. “There is one thing — one word — that has given me support in this difficult time. That word is ‘shaheed.’ I don’t know how I would have survived if this word did not exist.”

 

Tashfeen Malik Studied at Conservative Religious School In Pakistan

Tashfeen & Rizwan enter US in 2014 (Credit: wsj.com)
Tashfeen & Rizwan enter US in 2014
(Credit: wsj.com)

MULTAN, Dec 7— Tashfeen Malik, who went on a deadly shooting spree in California with her husband last week, studied after college at a conservative Islamic religious school here that attracts relatively well-educated and affluent women.

Officials at the Al-Huda International school said Ms. Malik took classes on the Quran for about a year until May 2014—two months before she moved to the U.S. and married a Pakistani-American man, Syed Rizwan Farook.

Earlier reports suggested she had left Pakistan after completing a university degree here in 2012. Some of her college friends said she hadn’t told them she attended classes at Al-Huda.

Al-Huda was founded in 1994 in Islamabad by a Pakistani woman, Farhat Hashmi, and now has branches around the world, including in the U.S. and Canada, according to the school.

Spokeswoman Farrukh Choudhry described Ms. Malik—who was born in a Pakistani family but grew up in Saudi Arabia—as “very loving and very obedient” while at the school. “No one would have thought that she could do something like this,” she said.

Classmates and university professors described her as traditional, but not extreme.

In a statement Monday, the school said “we cannot be held responsible for personal acts of any of our students.” It said Al-Huda promotes a “peaceful message of Islam and denounces extremism, violence and acts of terrorism.”

U.S. authorities say the 29-year-old Ms. Malik posted a message on her Facebook FB 0.99 % page Wednesday declaring her allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State extremist group, the same day she and her husband killed 14 people and injured 21 others. The couple was later killed in a shootout with police.

U.S. officials say they suspect that Ms. Malik radicalized Mr. Farook, who was born in the U.S. and worked for a county health department in San Bernardino, Calif.

Al-Huda officials in Multan, a city in central Pakistan, say Ms. Malik enrolled in their school April 2013 after completing a pharmacy degree at Bahauddin Zakariya University in the same city. She completed her last class at Al-Huda on May 3, 2014. Eight days later, she sent an email saying she was getting married and moving to the U.S., they said.

She requested information about correspondence courses and it was sent, but the school received no response, Ms. Choudhry said.

However, a woman who said she was a college friend of Ms. Malik said they went together to Al-Huda classes before Ms. Malik graduated from the university. The discrepancy couldn’t immediately be explained.

Ms. Malik appeared religious even when she started at the university in 2007, wearing a niqab—the all-covering veil that leaves only the eyes exposed—throughout her time there, according to her professors.

Unlike traditional madrassas, or religious schools, Al-Huda was founded to provide a modern Islamic education for women. In recent years, it also has begun to offer instruction to men. A poster in a shop window in Multan on Monday offered Al-Huda courses for teenage boys.

 

Ms. Choudhry said the group teaches students to understand the Quran. “We have no politics, no sect. We don’t touch controversial issues,” she said.

The school’s website says it aims to help students “find inner peace, develop good character, demonstrate effective interpersonal relations and become beneficial members of society working to better serve humanity.”

Critics of the group say it promotes a rigid, puritanical mind-set.

Sadaf Ahmad, author of a book on Al-Huda, said its followers have a “sense of righteousness” and their beliefs “have the potential to become de-humanizing, dangerous and harmful for others.”

Khaled Ahmed, a Lahore-based expert on religious extremism, called Al-Huda’s teachings “retrogressive.” He said because the founder, Ms. Hashmi, “is educated, speaks out against the ‘religious right’ and is a woman, other women find her teachings more acceptable and legitimate.”

He said the group is “increasing in popularity among educated, urban, upper-middle-class and upper-class women.”

Ms. Hashmi has a master’s degree in Arabic from Pakistan’s Punjab University and a Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Glasgow in Scotland, according to her website.

Her lectures in Pakistan and abroad often attract thousands of women. Her website says most of her funding comes from students, and she claims there that she has no affiliation with any religious group.

 

Ms. Malik’s family, originally from Pakistan, has been based in Saudi Arabia for about 30 years. One of her brothers, reached by phone in Riyadh, said the family only learned of her role in the California assault on television.

“We are in shock,” he said. “We don’t know what happened to our life.” He described his sister as studious and quiet, and said she showed no evidence of drifting toward extremism.

“She was very normal here,” said the brother, who didn’t want his name used for fear he would lose his job. “She was living in Saudi Arabia. There is no social life here. There is no life outside, no friends.”

He said he last saw her sister around a year and a half ago. They would speak every couple of months under pressure from their mother. “My mother would say: ‘She is your sister, why are you not talking to her?’”

—Margherita Stancati in Riyadh contributed to this article.

Tashfeen Malik was ‘modern girl’ who began posting extremist messages on Facebook

Rizwan & Tashfeen (Credit: LA Times)
Rizwan & Tashfeen
(Credit: LA Times)

Tashfeen Malik, the 29-year-old female shooter in the deadly San Bernardino rampage, was a onetime “modern girl” who became religious during college and then began posting extremist messages on Facebook after arriving in the U.S., a family member in Pakistan told the Los Angeles Times.

The family member, in Malik’s hometown of Karor Lal Esan who asked to not be identified, said Malik’s postings on Facebook were a source of concern for her family.

“After a couple of years in college, she started becoming religious. She started taking part in religious activities and also started asking women in the family and the locality to become good Muslims. She started taking part in religious activities of women in the area,” the family member told The Times.

“She used to talk to somebody in Arabic at night on the Internet. None of our family members in Pakistan know Arabic, so we do not know what she used to discuss,” the family member said. The family speaks Urdu and a dialect of Punjabi known as Saraiki.

Malik’s paternal aunt, Hafza Batool, told a local correspondent of the BBC that the family was in a state of shock. “She was so modern. I do not know what had happened to her. She brought a bad name to our family,” Batool said.

Malik pledged allegiance on Facebook to a leader of Islamic State just as Wednesday’s attack was getting underway.

The family member who spoke with The Times anonymously said Malik, who was born in Pakistan, moved with her family to Saudi Arabia when she was a child.

Malik traveled frequently to the Punjab region of Pakistan to visit family and then returned to study pharmacology at Bahauddin Zakariya University in the city of Multan in southern Punjab to study from 2007 to 2012, the family member said.

After attending the university in Pakistan, she returned to Saudi Arabia.

Malik met her future husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, online. The couple attacked a holiday gathering of Farook’s co-workers, killing 14 people and injuring 21 others in San Bernardino on Wednesday.

Farook, 28, was born in Chicago, and was the son of Pakistani immigrants — a truck driver and a clerk at Kaiser Permanente. He grew up in Riverside and attended La Sierra High School and studied at Cal State San Bernardino, earning a degree in environmental health. He then got a job as an inspector at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health.

The two married last year in Islam’s holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, according to Farook’s co-workers. Malik was granted a conditional green card last summer after a background check by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, and the couple held a walima, a celebration after the wedding, at the Islamic Center of Riverside for people who couldn’t attend the Saudi ceremony; a few hundred people attended, said Nizaam Ali, who worshiped with Farook at a San Bernardino mosque.

Ali said that he had met Malik on a few occasions, but that she wore a head scarf that obscured most of her face.

“If you asked me how she looked, I couldn’t tell you,” Ali said.

Malik and Farook had a baby girl in May.

Malik’s father owns a house in the Babar Colony neighborhood of Multan, where she attended the university, and she lived there during her studies.

The family was “not too social,” a neighbor told Pakistan’s Channel 24.

“The family would visit the house every three or four months, but they hardly have established links with the people in the area,” the neighbor said.

Dr. Nisar Hussain, one of Malik’s professors in the pharmacology department during her five years at the university, told The Times she was veiled when attending the college.

“She was religious, but a very normal person as well. She was a very hardworking and submissive student. She never created any problem in the class. She was an obedient girl. I cannot even imagine she could murder people,” he said in an interview.

Malik was a good student, and at one point, was first in her class, he said. “I don’t think she had any kind of mental illness. She was among the best students, always hardworking, never created problems.

“Yes, she was religious, but not an extremist. She never tried to influence the class in the name of religion, never,” he said.

women didn’t commingle.

“Tashfeen was an individual who kept to herself most of the time,” said Mohammad Abuershaid, an attorney representing the couple’s family. She was a soft-spoken housewife who stayed at home with the baby, the lawyer said, and the couple’s life was that of a “traditional” Muslim household.

Malik belonged to an educated, politically influential family from Karor Lal Esan in the Layyah district of Pakistan. Malik Ahmad Ali Aulakh, a cousin of Malik’s father, was once a provincial minister. Residents said the Aulakh family is known to have connections to militant Islam.

“The family has some extremist credentials,” said Zahid Gishkori, 32, a resident of the Layyah district in the area who knows the family well.

FBI director James B. Comey said Friday there is no indication that “these killers were part of an organized larger group or formed part of a cell. … There is no indication they were part of a network.”

Instead, the young couple fit a profile now distressingly familiar when looking at other recent acts of terrorism in the United States.

Malik and Farook were devout Muslims but not outwardly radical. They were members of a close-knit family with ties to the community. They built and stored crude pipe bombs in their home. And their attack apparently was inspired by, but not directed by, extremists abroad.

The couple thus had more in common with the Army psychiatrist who shot up a military facility at Ft. Hood, Texas, in 2009, and the North Caucasus brothers who set off homemade bombs at the Boston Marathon in 2013, than with the Belgian and French gunmen who killed 130 people last month in Paris.

In contrast with the Paris attacks, no evidence yet indicates that Farook and Malik were part of a larger conspiracy organized by Islamic State or another militant group, or were part of a bigger terrorist cell in California.

That helped them avoid detection before Wednesday’s massacre. Indeed, the absence of warning signs has become a hallmark of recent domestic plots, analysts said.

Investigators have learned that Farook had made contact — in some cases by phone and in others via social media — with people who came up tangentially in previous federal terrorism investigations. But he had not drawn any scrutiny.

Officials said that Malik had posted a comment swearing allegiance to Islamic State on a Facebook page — but only just before the couple stormed into a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center, guns blazing.

There was “nothing of such a significance” that it drew FBI attention before the attack, Comey said.

“The challenge the U.S. faces is that there are radical individuals who are being a lot more careful, and it makes them virtually impossible to detect,” said Seth Jones, a terrorism analyst with the Rand Corp., a Santa Monica-based think tank.

That is a change from the threat Americans faced after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when Al Qaeda and its supporters repeatedly sought to bomb airliners or other U.S. targets, using operatives who were trained and directed by militants abroad.

With Al Qaeda now overshadowed by Islamic State, the threat inside the United States increasingly comes from self-radicalized individuals.

Their plots are less organized and possibly less deadly, but paradoxically are harder to stop, analysts say.

“There are no direct communications or orders that you can intercept to realize that there’s a plot going on,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “There’s an absence of red flags.”

Investigators may find that Farook and Malik left digital or other tracks that have not yet emerged.

After Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people and injured more than 30 at a military processing center at Ft. Hood on Nov. 5, 2009, for example, investigators found that a Joint Terrorism Task Force knew he had been in direct contact with Anwar Awlaki, an Al Qaeda leader in Yemen who was later killed in a U.S. drone strike.

And after Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev killed three people and wounded more than 260 at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, the Russian government said it had warned the FBI two years earlier that Tamerlan and his mother were “adherents of radical Islam” and that he was preparing to join unspecified “bandit underground groups” in Dagestan and Chechnya.

The FBI failed to follow up on the warnings, a subsequent investigation showed.

Still, the pattern of Islamic extremists operating in the U.S. without outside direction is a clear change from the period after Sept. 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda and its supporters repeatedly sought to bomb airliners or other U.S. targets with operatives who were trained and directed by militants abroad.

Those included the incident in late 2001 when a British citizen tried to detonate explosives in his shoe on a flight to Miami; a foiled 2009 plot to bomb New York City subways by an Afghan American who had trained at Al Qaeda camps; and the 2010 attempted car bombing in New York’s Times Square by a Connecticut resident who had traveled to Pakistan for training.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the network’s affiliate in Yemen, hatched two other failed plots — the 2009 attempt to down a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit by a Nigerian man with a bomb in his underwear, and a 2010 attempt to explode bombs hidden in printer cartridges aboard two U.S.-bound cargo jets.

Even before Wednesday’s attack, the FBI had about 900 active investigations of suspected Islamic State sympathizers or supporters and other homegrown extremists. Authorities have arrested 71 people on charges related to the group since March 2014, including 56 this year.

The group’s social media, propaganda videos and direct appeals have exhorted followers to launch attacks in their own countries. In recent weeks, militants have bombed a Russian aircraft over Egypt, conducted bombings in Lebanon and Libya, and shot up restaurants and other sites in Paris.

Last fall, Islamic State released a video by a spokesman, Abu Muhammad Adnani, that called for revenge against countries that sent forces to Iraq and Syria to fight them, including Australia, France, Canada and the United States.

Michael C. Leiter, a former senior counterterrorism official in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, said that signaled a greater danger in some ways because Islamic State wasn’t trying to send operatives into the United States.

“People ask, ‘Is it directed or is it inspired?’ I think that’s entirely the wrong rubric because their direction is to inspire,” Leiter said. “They are not looking to direct attacks at all.”

Special correspondent Sahi reported from Islamabad, and Times staff writers Cloud and Bennett from Washington.

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Soumya Karlamangla, Paloma Esquivel, Laura J. Nelson, Harriet Ryan, Dexter Thomas, Matt Hamilton, W.J. Hennigan, Peter Jamison, Jack Dolan, Richard Winton, Richard A. Serrano, Joel Rubin, Joseph Serna, Veronica Rocha, Thomas Curwen, Corina Knoll, Marisa Gerber, Ruben Vives, Hailey Branson-Potts, Sarah Parvini, Kate Mather, Taylor Goldenstein, Anh Do, Lauren Raab, Christine Mai-Duc, Stephen Ceasar, Cindy Chang, Garrett Therolf, Paresh Dave, Phil Willon and Rong-Gong Lin II.

Authorities pick through suspects’ path: Marriage, baby and then bloodshed

Syed Rizwan Farooq (Credit: www.people.com)
Syed Rizwan Farooq
(Credit: www.people.com)
Washington Dec 3 – After the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday that left 14 people dead, details are starting to emerge about the two shooters. Here’s what we know about Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik.

Syed Rizwan Farook was looking for a wife. On at least two online sites, he posted details for prospective brides. “Religious but modern,” he apparently wrote on one. He made a point of noting his American citizenship on another.

How he ultimately made contact with Pakistan-born Tashfeen Malik remains unclear. But family members said Farook traveled to Saudi Arabia, where Malik was living, and that they returned to Southern California as a couple and began a life in quiet Redlands, an area of ranch houses and once lush lawns now browned by drought.

Wednesday morning, they dropped off their 6-month-old daughter with Farook’s mother, according to family members. Sometime around midday, police say they donned masks and armed themselves with assault rifles and handguns before storming a holiday party hosted by the county health agency where Farook worked. At least 14 people died. Hours later, 28-year-old Farook and 27-year-old Malik were dead by police gunfire just two miles from the massacre site.

[FBI takes over shooting investigation as Obama says it’s ‘possible’ it was terrorism]

Details about the lives and views of the two suspected assailants are still incomplete. But as authorities stitch together the events surrounding the latest U.S. mass shooting, two disparate portraits emerge — one of American suburban stability and the other of immigrant reinvention — that seem to intersect somewhere in the Pakistani diaspora.

Also still puzzling investigators is what drove the two suspected attackers to turn the holiday party into a killing zone. It is extremely rare for a mass shooting in America to have multiple perpetrators — and even more so for one of them to be a woman.

“We have not ruled out terrorism,” said San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan.
Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles, told The Washington Post that Farook and Malik had been married for two years.

The couple told the grandmother that they had a doctor’s appointment and needed her to take care of the child, Ayloush said.

“I have no idea why he would do something like this,” Farhan Khan, who is married to Farook’s sister, said at a news conference held by CAIR late Wednesday night.

Farook — born in Illinois to Pakistani immigrant parents — was a San Bernardino County employee who had worked for five years as an environmental health specialist in the public health department, which was hosting the holiday party where the shooting occurred. According to state employee records, Farook’s total compensation in 2013, including salary and benefits, was $71,230.

Malik was born in Pakistan and spent time in Saudi Arabia before marrying Farook, said Ayloush, the Muslim community leader.

The California couple join a long roster of convicted and alleged mass shooters from recent years. But in contrast to many others, Farook and Malik do not appear so far to have left a digital trail that could point to their motives.

Christopher Harper-Mercer, the 26-year-old who fatally shot nine people and then killed himself at a community college in Oregon in October, left behind social media profiles that indicated an affinity with Nazism, anti-religious views and a desire to “lash out at society.”

[
Charleston, S.C., church shooting suspect Dylann Roof posted Facebook photos of himself wearing emblems of white supremacist movements, and owned a website containing a lengthy manifesto against racial minorities.

But where Farook and Malik are concerned, the traces of them that can be found on the Internet are relatively benign: a baby registry that appeared to be in Malik’s name, and undated online dating profiles that appeared to be Farook’s. Among other things, he stated an interest in target shooting.

The baby registry page cites a May due date in Riverside, which is near San Bernardino. Malik’s requests are modest: diapers, baby wash, swabs and a convertible car seat.

Another site — described as “for people with disabilities and second marriage” — includes a description that appears to match Farook.

The “About Him” section on the iMilap.com site introduces someone who works for the county as a “health, safety and envorimental [sic] inspector.” It further states that he is from a religious but modern family of four, lives with his parents and enjoys working on cars as well as “just hang out in back yard doing target pratice [sic] with younger sister and friends.”
He added that he enjoyed working on vintage and modern cars, and read religious books while enjoying eating out sometimes.

On another matchmaker site, Dubaimatrimonial.com, a person believed to be Farook described himself as having family roots in Karachi, noting he was born in Chicago and was residing in Los Angeles as an American citizen.

Farook graduated from California State University at San Bernardino with a degree in environmental health in 2009, according to the university’s commencement document.

His seemingly steady persona — high school, college, career — stands in contrast, however, with the apparently turbulent home life of his parents for more than a decade.

The couple, Rafia and Syed Farook, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in 2002, according to county documents.

Four years later, Rafia then submitted paperwork for a separation after more than 24 years of marriage, citing verbal and physical harassment and describing her husband as “irresponsible, negligent, and an alcoholic.” Conditions were put in place for visitation with their daughter, Eba, who was born in 1991 — four years after her brother, the alleged shooter.

A series of court filings were made between 2006 and 2012 related to their separation. In one 2008 document, the hit from the U.S. financial crisis appeared to be noted: Showing the estimated value of their Riverside home at $175,000 but owing about $100,000 more. A judge granted her petition for a divorce earlier this year.
In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, Syed Farook’s co-workers in the public health department said he was “quiet and polite, with no obvious grudges.”

“He never struck me as a fanatic; he never struck me as suspicious,” Griselda Reisinger said.

Fellow inspectors Patrick Baccari and Christian Nwadike said the “tall, thin young man with a full beard” rarely started conversations, but he was well-liked and spent a lot of time in the field.

They said Farook was a devout Muslim but didn’t discuss religion at work.
Reports show that Farook inspected public pools and eating establishments. His job required him to check the cleanliness of food surfaces and cooling methods, analyze chlorine levels and test kitchen equipment.

Wednesday’s mass shooting was the deadliest in the United States since 2012, when a lone gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

According to CNN, of the 28 deadliest shootings in U.S. history before Wednesday, “only two have come at the hands of multiple shooters: the February 1983 killings at the Wah Mee gambling and social club in Seattle and the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999.”

An FBI report released last year said there were 160 “active shooter” incidents in the United States between 2000 and 2013. Among those, all but two involved a single shooter, the report states.

Pakistani terrorist killed in staged shootout, say police sources

LEJ Founder (Credit: tribune.com.pk)
LEJ Founder
(Credit: tribune.com.pk)

Islamabad, Nov 26 – A founder of a Pakistani terror group has been shot dead in the middle of Lahore, in an incident that senior police sources privately admitted was a killing staged by the authorities.

Haroon Bhatti, who was extradited from Dubai in September, was killed while in police custody, along with three other members of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). LeJ has a track record of attacks on Pakistan’s Shia minority, and intelligence officials feared it could join forces with Islamic State.

Lahore police said the men were “hardcore terrorists” involved in dozens of sectarian killings as well as the kidnapping in 2011 of Warren Weinstein, a US aid worker who was accidentally killed in a US drone strike this year.

In the official version of events, Bhatti led police to an abandoned plastic-bag factory where LeJ militants were hiding. The militants opened fire at about 12.30am, leaving Bhatti and three others dead but not injuring any police.

Residents in the Badami Bagh area said police cordoned off the small factory building during the midnight raid and that gunfire could be heard for about an hour.

Police photos of the scene showed the men lying dead in a simple concrete building, some with weapons nearby. The hands of Bhatti’s body remained bound with handcuffs. The factory’s bullet-riddled gate suggested all the gunfire had been directed into the building.

Speaking privately, three police officials told the Guardian that the “encounter” was deliberately staged to get rid of militants that Pakistan’s enfeebled judicial system would never have prosecuted.

“This had to be done to maintain peace in the province,” said a Lahore-based officer. “No one would have given evidence against them because witnesses would be brutally targeted. You can’t allow terrorists to carry on their attacks just because you don’t have any proof against them.”

So-called police “encounters” are common practice in Pakistan, and Wednesday’s incident mirrors the death in July of LeJ’s former leader Malik Ishaq and 13 of his followers in an isolated area near the town of Muzaffargarh. Ishaq was killed in a gun battle that supposedly erupted while police were taking him to identify an arms cache.

 

The extreme measures taken against LeJ underline a profound change of attitude on the part of the Pakistani state towards some of the country’s militant groups. In the past Ishaq had been able to act with near impunity because violent Islamist groups such as LeJ were part of the wider network of jihadi groups encouraged to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In the last 18 months, however, the state has set out to crush those groups that have turned their guns on domestic targets, including religious minorities.

Khaled Ahmed, a longstanding critic of the security establishment’s use of jihadi groups, said the killings in Lahore were a significant development. “A decision has been made by the army to act against these elements who have been always attached to the army in the past,” he said, crediting the policy change to Raheel Sharif, the general who took command of Pakistan’s all-powerful army in 2013. “I think this general is all for shutting shop on these non-state actors.”

In July intelligence chiefs warned the government that LeJ was poised for a potential merger with Isis, which has not yet been able to develop a firm support base in Pakistan.

Analysts say Pakistan’s civilian government backs the tough stance against LeJ despite fears in the past of provoking an organisation with a powerful base in Punjab, the province from where the ruling Pakistan Muslim League draws most of its support.

A leading figure in the party, the Punjab home minister Shuja Khanzada, was killed in a bomb attack in April, widely seen as a revenge for the killing of Ishaq.

 

A Murderer — and Also a Victim of Place

Qadri supporters (Credit: pakistantoday.com)
Qadri supporters
(Credit: pakistantoday.com)

Last month I read for the first time my father’s killer’s version of what happened on the afternoon of Jan. 4, 2011. My father, Salman Taseer, was the governor of Punjab, in Pakistan, when he was shot dead by his own bodyguard in Islamabad. He was at the time defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy.

The laws that condemned her had been instituted in the 1980s by a military dictator. Those were the years when the Saudis, the Pakistanis and — it must be said — the Americans, believing no evil to be greater than that of Communism, flirted with jihad in Afghanistan. All variety of strange fruit, including the Taliban and Al Qaeda, have come from that time.

My father’s murderer — 26 when he killed my father — is from a later, hardier crop. It may be said that he came to fruition around the same time that the Islamic State first sent its men to Syria. It is instructive to hear him speak. He is a living example of how faith can become an expression of a society’s deepest cultural tensions. Here is Malik Mumtaz Qadri:

On the faithful day, I being member of Elite Force I was deployed as one of the member of Escort Guard of Salman Taseer, the Governor Punjab. In Koh-i-Sar Market, the Governor with another after having lunch in a restaurant walked to his vehicle. In adjoining mosque I went for urinating in the washroom and for making ablution. When I came out with my gun, I came across Salman Taseer. Then I had the occasion to address him, “your honor being the Governor had remarked about blasphemy law as black law, if so it was unbecoming of you.” Upon this he suddenly shouted and said, “Not only that it is black law, but also it is my shit.” Being a Muslim I lost control and under grave and suddenly provocation, I pressed the trigger and he lay dead in front of me. I have no repentance and I did it for “Tahafuz-i- Namoos-i-Rasool” Salman offered me grave and sudden provocation. I was justified to kill him kindly see my accompanying written statement U/s 265(F)(5) of Cr. P. C.”

To read this description, translated into tortured English, and complete with a certain quality of detail, the visit to the mosque, the urinating, the prayer — the little things one does before committing an act of murder! — was to feel all the revulsion and pathos one must feel upon hearing of the crimes of a child soldier.

The judgment was meant to be happy news; the Supreme Court of Pakistan had upheld the death sentence handed down to Mr. Qadri. And yet how happy could one really feel? A young man from a poor background, who was not a criminal, had, under the influence of a bad ideology, committed a terrible crime. It was hard not to see Mr. Qadri as a victim of place. He would have been exposed on a daily basis to the hysteria whipped up on Pakistan’s television channels over my father’s description of the blasphemy law as a black law. We know that he went to nocturnal religious gatherings where he would sing hymns in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. There again, clerics inflamed with religious passion would remind Mr. Qadri of the apostasy of my father, his godlessness, the injury he had done to the revered figure of the prophet. They also actively sought volunteers to kill my father.

Mr. Qadri was surrounded by people who believed that my father’s crimes were punishable by death, and that it was incumbent upon the best Muslims to avenge them. In this parallel universe, Mr. Qadri was not just acting bravely; he was acting honorably.

Nor could the court root out the source of the evil that had motivated Mr. Qadri. In fact, Mr. Qadri’s defense sought recourse in that very idea that had led him to murder. It sought to establish the conditions under which it would be just for Mr. Qadri to kill my father. “Personal life of Salman Taseer,” the defense stated, “shows that right from early times he proved himself as an infidel … His lifestyle, faith and living with a lady of non-Muslim faith” — my mother! — “reflecting his act of living in constant state of Zinna under the pretext of marriage (not permissible in Islam) speak volume of his character and associated matters.”

The court at best could stop Mr. Qadri from playing judge and executioner; but it could not throw out the basis for his argument; it could not say that the idea of apostasy (irtad) itself was an abomination in a modern society. For were that so, there would not have been a woman rotting in jail on charges of blasphemy in the first place.

Mr. Qadri is a hero in Pakistan. There is at least one mosque named after him, so popular it’s due to double in size; people come with their children to see him in jail, and seek his blessings; he releases CDs of himself singing those hauntingly beautiful hymns in praise of the prophet. He is considered a religious hero, a mujahid.

But he is really a class hero. In societies likes ours, societies with colonial histories, religion provides the front; but what is actually going on is class warfare by other means. When Mr. Qadri’s defense gestures to my father’s “lifestyle … character and associated matters,” what they are really saying, in thinly coded language, is that he was liberal, educated, Westernized; privileged, in a word. The real danger, of course, is to the liberal state, and its values, which also come to be seen as nothing but the affectations of a godless and deracinated class.

Pakistan, by letting religion enter its bone marrow, made itself especially vulnerable; but the danger itself, of faith’s providing extra-legal legitimacy to those waging culture wars, is as real in Rowan County, Ky., as it is in Pakistan’s neighbor, India. In fact, even as all this was happening in Pakistan, the main organ of the Hindu nationalist group the R.S.S. ran a cover story, using a Vedic injunction against cow slaughter to justify the lynching of a man. It said, “The Vedas order killing of anyone who slaughters the cow. Cow slaughter is a big issue for the Hindu community. For many of us it’s a question of life and death.”

Perhaps; but for the rest of us the real question of life and death is how to defend the liberal state against culture wars that find their sanction in faith. It is no accident that it is among the least educated, most backward sections of our society that God finds his most committed soldiers. And if there is anything to be learned from that flirtation with jihad in the 1980s, it is that the only thing scarier than Marx is God fertilized with Marx.

An ISIS Militant From Belgium Whose Own Family Wanted Him Dead

Abdelhamid Abaoud (Credit: acn.com)
Abdelhamid Abaoud
(Credit: acn.com)

BRUSSELS, Nov 17 — When the family of Abdelhamid Abaaoud received word from Syria last fall that he had been killed fighting for the Islamic State, it rejoiced at what it took to be excellent news about a wayward son it had come to despise.

“We are praying that Abdelhamid really is dead,” his older sister, Yasmina, said at the time.

The family’s prayers — and the hopes of Western security officials — were not answered. Mr. Abaaoud, then 26, was in reality on his way back to Europe to meet secretly with Islamic extremists who shared his determination to spread mayhem. He has since been linked to a string of terrorist operations that culminated with Friday’s attacks in Paris.

“Of course, it is not joyous to make blood flow. But, from time to time, it is pleasant to see the blood of disbelievers,” Mr. Abaaoud declared in a French-language recruiting video for the Islamic State released shortly before his supposed death.

During his travels back to Europe at the end of last year, European security services picked up his trail and tracked his cellphone to Athens, according to a retired European military official. But they lost him, and soon after that he appeared to have made it back to Belgium, where he had grown up in a moderately successful family from Morocco.

At about the time Mr. Abaaoud began his return journey to Europe, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, a leader with the Islamic State — he now has a $5 million bounty on his head, offered by the United States — made an impassioned plea for the killings of disbelievers. “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European, especially the spiteful and filthy French, then rely on Allah and kill him in any manner or way however it may be,” Mr. Adnani said in a recorded message.

Western intelligence agencies, worried that the Islamic State was planning to widen its carnage from the Middle East to Europe, tried to track a slow but steady trickle of fighters in Syria as they headed home to the Continent.

A Belgian television station reported Monday that security services had been alerted to Mr. Abaaoud’s return to Europe by a telephone call he made from Greece to an inmate, the brother of a known jihadist, in Belgium.

The realization among security officials that Mr. Abaaoud was back in Europe led to a major operation to intercept him. A safe house for militants he had helped set up in eastern Belgium was raided in January.

There, two of his comrades, including the brother of the inmate he had called, were killed. The Belgian authorities trumpeted the raid as having thwarted “a major terrorist operation.”

But it missed its principal target, Mr. Abaaoud, who then somehow made his way back to Syria, which Islamic State refers to by its historical Muslim name, “Sham.”

“Allah blinded their vision and I was able to leave and come to Sham despite being chased by so many intelligence agencies,” he later told Dabiq, a slickly produced magazine published by the Islamic State.

It is not known whether Mr. Abaaoud had any direct contact in Syria with Mr. Adnani, the architect of what the C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, on Monday called the Islamic State’s “external operations agenda.” As a low-level fighter, Mr. Abaaoud was unlikely to have mixed with senior figures in the militant group’s hierarchy, experts in Belgium said.

But the two men shared a passion for propaganda, with Mr. Adnani serving as the Islamic State’s official spokesman and Mr. Abaaoud featured in various recruitment campaigns.

Mr. Abaaoud also had an invaluable asset for Islamic State leaders eager to take their battle to Europe — a pool of friends and contacts back home willing to carry out attacks.

Like many of the jihadists who have carried out attacks in Europe, including the brothers who attacked the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January, Mr. Abaaoud showed far more interest in thievery and drugs when he was a young man than in Islam, particularly the highly disciplined, self-sacrificing Salafi strain favored by many militants.

Nor was his family impoverished. His father, Omar, owned a clothing store off the market square in Molenbeek, a borough of Brussels, and the family lived nearby in a spacious if shabby corner home on Rue de l’Avenir — Future Street — near the local police station.

Despite his subsequent denunciations of the mistreatment suffered by Muslims in Europe, he enjoyed privileges available to few immigrants, including admission to an exclusive Catholic school, Collège Saint-Pierre d’Uccle, in an upscale residential district of Brussels.

He was given a place as a first-year student in the secondary school but stayed only one year. An assistant to Saint-Pierre’s director, who declined to give her name, said he had apparently flunked out. Others say he was dismissed for poor behavior.

He then drifted into a group of friends in Molenbeek who engaged in various petty crimes. Among his friends were Ibrahim and Salah Abdeslam, two brothers who, like Mr. Abaaoud, lived just a few blocks away and are now at the center of the investigation into the Paris attacks.

Ibrahim Abdeslam was one of the suicide bombers on Friday, and Salah Abdeslam, who rented a car in Brussels that was used to transport some of the gunmen in the attacks on Paris, is the target of an extensive manhunt.

Mr. Abaaoud was arrested for petty crime in 2010 and spent time in the same prison in Brussels where Ibrahim Abdeslam was being held, according to the spokesman for Belgium’s federal prosecutor and Ibrahim’s former lawyer. It is not known if they were in touch while in the prison, but they did not stay long. After their release, they returned to Molenbeek, often hanging out at a dingy bar known as a hangout for drug dealers.

To the dismay of his family, which had not seen him show any religious zeal, Mr. Abaaoud suddenly moved to Syria in the beginning of 2014, according to jihadi experts tracking Belgian militants.

Soon after his arrival in Syria, where he stayed for a time in a grand villa in Aleppo used to house French-speaking jihadists, he explained his choice in a video: “All my life I have seen the blood of Muslims flow. I pray that God breaks the backs of those who oppose him” and “that he exterminates them,” he said.

Early this year, the French magazine Paris Match found a film that showed Mr. Abaaoud grinning and making jokes as he dragged corpses with a pickup truck.

“I suddenly saw my picture all over the media,” he told Dabiq. He added that “thanks to Allah, the infidels were blinded by Allah” and did not spot him when he returned to Europe at the end of last year.

He also somehow persuaded his younger brother, Younes, who was still in Molenbeek and only 13, to join him in Syria. The boy left Belgium for Syria on his own without raising any suspicion from the authorities.

Mr. Abaaoud’s father joined a state prosecutor’s case against his son in May for having recruited Younes.

“I can’t take it anymore,” Omar Abaaoud told local reporters at the time. “I am on medication,” he said, adding that his son had dishonored the family. “He destroyed our families. I don’t ever want to see him again.”

His father is now living in Morocco and wants to put the property on Future Street up for sale, a family friend said.

Now, Mr. Abaaoud is suspected of being a leader of a branch of the Islamic State in Syria called Katibat al-Battar al Libi, which has its origins in Libya. This particular branch has attracted many Belgian fighters because of language and cultural ties, said Pieter van Ostaeyen, who tracks Belgian militants.

Many Belgian Muslims are of Moroccan origin, he said, and speak a dialect found in eastern Morocco that is similar to a Libyan dialect. Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, who studies jihadi groups at the Middle East Forum, a research center in Washington, said there was no evidence yet that the Paris attacks had been ordered by Mr. Adnani or the Islamic State’s overall leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

But he added that the soldiers at the Libyan branch that includes Mr. Abaaoud had played a prominent role in exporting violence. One of their tasks, he said, has been to organize plots that “involved foreign fighters, sleeper cells in Europe that were connected with an operative inside of Syria and Iraq, usually in a lower to midlevel position.”

About 520 Belgian fighters have gone to Syria or Iraq to fight, making Belgium the biggest suspected source, per capita, of foreign fighters for ISIS. According to posts on Twitter and other social media accounts, the two men who were killed during the raid in Verviers, Belgium, in January were members of Katibat al-Battar.