The family of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the Paris attacks, lived on Future Street in Brussels. Theirs was a “spacious if shabby corner home,” my colleagues, Andrew Higgins and Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, write. Abaaoud’s parents, Moroccan immigrants to Belgium, had done well enough.
The Rue de l’Avenir, or Future Street, was supposed to lead to a decent European life, not veer off to Syria and the apocalyptic universe of the Islamic State. Future Street, a place of opportunity for the industrious, was what the Turkish and Moroccan and Algerian immigrants coming to Europe from the 1960s onward sought.
Abaaoud, son of Brussels, was not poor, not stupid, not marginalized. He was on the ladder before he stepped off into a zigzagging life between Syria and Europe. He attended for a year an exclusive Catholic School, the Collège Saint-Pierre d’Uccle. I lived in Uccle between 1980 and 1982. Europe does not get much more leafy or placid than that.
But Future Street, so luminous a half-century ago during the great postwar European recovery — what the French call “Les Trente Glorieuses” (or the 30 glorious years) — has become a much more ambiguous place. It is now situated, thanks to technology, between homeland and adopted land in the jangling, borderless, cacophonous space of modern civilization.
A bad economy is not what flips young Muslims off Future Street onto the road to Raqqa. It’s the humiliation of purposelessness. It’s a quest for respect. It’s laying the burden of choice to rest through a subsuming mission against the “decadent” West. It’s the discovery of a plausible flight from ambivalent modernity to the Caliphate’s zealous strictures.
Abaaoud, killed by French security forces in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, joins all the other sons (mainly sons) who could not abide the future despite comfortable circumstances and opted to take refuge from it in the all-resolving ideology of jihadist violence. He joins Mohamed Atta and Faisal Shahzad and Michael Adebolajo, plotters and perpetrators from New York to London who did not come from poverty or social exclusion.
Atta, who took the first plane into the North Tower, and Shahzad, who plotted mayhem at Times Square, and Adebolajo, who killed a British soldier with a knife and machete on a London street, placed their college educations at the service of destruction of the liberal Western order. Theirs were the educated choices of what the late Fouad Ajami called “Islam’s nowhere men,” people for whom Western freedom became alienation.
ISIS is not a social issue. You don’t kill 130 people in Paris because you lost your job or never had one. It is ideological. It must therefore be fought by a counter-ideology, among other things. This neither the United States nor Europe nor their nominal Arab and Muslim allies have been able to articulate. Saudi Arabia and Turkey have played double games with their bastard child, ISIS.
What inhabits that spacious if shabby corner house on Future Street? In one Islamic State video, Abaaoud urged Muslims to shake off a “humiliating life” in Europe and find “pride and honor” in their religion and in jihad.
Humiliation is an ample notion. It may embrace anything from the Algerian war of more than a half century ago to the Iraq war; it may invoke Gaza; it may be social; it may well be sexual. But whatever its nature, it is escaped by adherence to the Islamic State’s state in the making, that border-straddling land where doubt goes to die, where each day has its assigned task and all needs are met.
The dangerous thing about this ISIS territory, the Caliphate’s embryo, is not so much its oil revenue, or its training facilities, or its proximity to the West, or its control over several million people — it is its magnetic assertion of Suuni jihadist power, the retort to humiliation that drew Abaaoud from Future Street. The United States and Europe would not have accepted its existence in 2001. They would not have accepted that terrorists centered in a sanctuary close to a NATO border could shut down Brussels or the University of Chicago.
But the West will no longer deploy infantry against global jihad. Nor will Arab states. That is a high-risk policy — too high, in my view. ISIS is working on the means to make the carnage in Paris look modest.
Europe is now entwined with the Syrian debacle — its refugees moving westward, its violence, its intra-Islamic battle, and its jihadi-spawning void. Abaaoud’s story is also a warning in a world where, as Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter put it recently at Harvard’s Kennedy School, “destructive power of greater and greater magnitude falls into the hands of smaller and smaller groups of human beings.”
Future Street has done a one-eighty. Europe’s opportunities drew Abaaoud’s father to Brussels. Abaaoud’s younger brother, Younes, was 13 when he left Brussels for Syria. He will likely return. And this middle-class adolescent Islamist will not be bearing a bouquet.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/opinion/terror-from-europes-future-street.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0