Back in Paris, my initial working hypothesis was immediately confirmed: French intel started focusing on a single cell of Syria returnees as the perpetrators, before the investigation expanded -- by accident -- towards the Belgian connection, and "three coordinated teams of gunmen," according to the Paris prosecutor.
That happened courtesy of a parking ticket found in a VW Polo; it led French intel to Molenbeek, aka "Little Morocco" northwest of downtown Brussels, a notorious Syrian returnee hub, crammed with shady, clandestine Salafi and Salafi-jihadi cells. As it stands, at least seven people in the European-wide investigation dragnet have been arrested in Molenbeek, and that's where the Polo was rented. In the years after 9/11, I used to joke with local friends and sources, when I was back from the Gulf and walked the area, that I felt like "home."
Belgian intel knows all there is to know about this state of affairs. The problem is essentially they can't do anything about it -- even as Belgium exhibits the largest per capita ratio of jihadis from "Syraq"; according to official numbers, 494 jihadis have been identified, 272 are still in "Syraq," 75 are presumed dead, 134 are back, and 13 are on their way to the Levant.
So imagine the French investigation juggernaut arriving in Belgium by accident. Talk about a major intra-European security/intel failure. What they had was at best a hunch about homegrown -- returnee -- jihadis up to something, including, alarmingly, munitions specialists able to come up with made in Europe suicide vests and foot soldiers able to smuggle Kalashnikovs bought in the Balkans for 300 euros, as Europol well knows.
These are Caliph Ibrahim's European "army." Young. Born and bred in the EU. Usually double nationality. Statistically "invisible." Totally integrated locally; what first struck me in Paris is how the targets in the 10eme and 11eme were carefully chosen.
Their loyalty is to a virtual de-territorialized nation (if only Deleuze and Guattari were alive to conceptualize it); and in a remixed 21st version of Etienne de la Boetie's 1576 classic Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, they are "born-again" Muslims, born and bred in the developed West, deranged by Wahhabi Salafi-jihadism, and choosing to become slaves of a hazy "command and control" entity that is the embodiment of barbarism.
They learn to use weapons, technology, camouflage, and communication techniques just to become slave "soldiers" -- voluntarily submitted to servitude. The infernal mechanism is simple; once you've graduated as a Syrian returnee, you got your homegrown diploma, and you're free to attack the -- secular republic -- that issued your passport.
As for the notion that this small invisible army is supported by millions, that's nonsense. The majority of France's near 5 million Muslims is actually secular, galaxies away from Salafi-jihadism.
Meet the social network jihadi
Spare a thought for the French BRI (Brigade of Research and Intervention), trying like mad to profile this invisible army espousing a warped Born to Kill ideology. But BRI just intervenes at the last minute, like when they stormed the Bataclan music venue and killed the killing team of three.
It's the DGSI -- French internal services -- which is in the dock, as we learned that at least one of the identified French killers was under surveillance since 2010 and had a "radical" file. France badly needs streamlining -- what with competition between the DGSI, the anti-terrorist section of the police prefecture and the so-called Sdat (anti-terrorist sub-direction).
So this may be as much a major intel fail as French administrative impotence to act upon intel. Still a fail. Daesh de facto outwitted what's regarded as one of the best intel apparatuses in the West. Or did it?
The star of the show seems to be this smiling man, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, aka Abu Omar Al-Baljiki, which French intel is now floating as the possible mastermind of the Paris massacre.
Talk about a jihadi superstar; he delights in social media, gives interviews to jihadi outlets, organizes attacks (the previous one, last January, failed), humiliates Belgian security with his back-and-forth between Europe and Syria, and always manages to concoct a daring escape. As a piece of casting, he certainly beats Ben Whishaw as "Q."
Further discrepancies are evident when the three teams at the Paris carnage are compared.
The Stade de France team featured absolute patsies trying to enter a high-visibility football match in a heavily policed stadium wearing a suicide vest. Just expendable "martyrs" -- "Syrian passport" and all.
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