European and U.S. intelligence officials expressed alarm that the supposed architect of the deadly Paris attacks last week was able to slip so easily back and forth between Syria and the heart of Western Europe, even as French officials confirmed Thursday that the Islamic State terrorist Abdelhamid Abaaoud had been killed in a raid in a Paris suburb.
During the days between last Friday’s attacks Abaaoud’s death on Wednesday, French and American officials had said the Belgian of Moroccan descent was believed to be in Islamic State’s Syrian base and that he had even been the target of a Western airstrike there as recently as a month ago.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve admitted Thursday that he and other European officials had no idea Abaaoud was actually in France, saying it was days after the attacks that “an intelligence service of a country outside Europe” had alerted French officials the suspect was believed to be in Greece.
The country he was referring to was not clear. The CIA’s office of public affairs declined to comment Thursday when asked whether American intelligence had believed Abaaoud was in Syria or in France at the time of the attacks.
“The French are leading the investigation into the Paris attacks, and we’d refer specific questions to them,” said Ryan Whaylen, an agency spokesman.
But one U.S. official told The Washington Times on condition of anonymity that “it was not our initial assessment that [Abaaoud] was in Paris.” And, CNN on Thursday, citing its own unnamed source, reported that it was actually a Moroccan intelligence agency that ultimately tipped the French off that Abaaoud was in France.
Officials in both Belgium and France launched more raids Thursday in search of suspected supporters of the Nov. 13 attack, while France’s National Assembly voted to extend a state of emergency for three months.
France has stepped up airstrikes against extremists in Syria, and a French military spokesman said Thursday that French forces have destroyed 35 Islamic State targets there since the attacks on Paris.
Abaaoud, who was born in Belgium to Moroccan immigrant parents and was in his late-20s, was known by European officials to be a threat. Belgian authorities reportedly first began searching for him in March 2014, following his appearance in an Islamic State Internet video that showed him driving a pickup truck full of dead bodies near a mass grave in Syria.
In January of 2015, authorities linked him to a foiled plot to kill security officials in the Belgian city of Verviers after two of his associates died in a raid on a safe house there.
A month later, a profile of Abaaoud — replete with glossy photos of him — appeared in the Islamic State’s English-language propaganda magazine, Dabiq. In an interview Abaaoud brags of evading European intelligence officials even after his picture was broadcast in the Western media.
The profile implies that Abaaoud was operating in Syria this year. But the presence of his bullet-riddled body after Wednesday’s raid in Paris suggests he was able to sneak back into Europe at some point during recent months.
PHOTOS: Abdelhamid Abaaoud killed, but his travels worry intel experts
“This situation is stunning on a number of fronts,” said Thomas Joscelyn, a terror analyst who edits the Long War Journal at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Clearly everybody thought this guy was in Syria. He’s a known quantity as a terrorist and yet he managed to evade a massive manhunt and was able make his way to the north of Paris.”
Mr. Joscelyn said the development shows how different the Islamic State’s external attack posture is in comparison to al Qaeda, which ISIS is largely seen to have supplanted. Al Qaeda pursued international plots using so-called “sleeper cells” of operatives whose involvement depended on the secrecy of their identities.
“Consider that nobody knew Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11 until six months after the attacks,” Mr. Joscelyn said. “Abaaoud, if he really is as important to the Paris attacks as the French are saying, is the exact opposite. Everybody knew he was an ISIS logistics guy in Europe, and yet he still slipped past the West’s defenses,” he said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
Mr. Joscelyn did not discount the possibility that ISIS propagandists intentionally sought to create a cloud of misinformation about Abaaoud’s whereabouts earlier this year by publishing the Dabiq profile that suggested he was in Syria.
Islamic State’s apparent efforts to confuse Western officials about Abaaoud’s status was noted in an May 2015 Department of Homeland Security “Intelligence Assessment” that said telephone calls alerting Abaaoud’s family members in late 2014 that he had been killed in Syria “may have been done intentionally to deter efforts by Belgian officials to track his activities.”
CIA Director John O. Brennan said Monday in Washington that “a lot of our partners right now in Europe are facing a lot of challenges in terms of the numbers of individuals who have traveled to Syria and Iraq and back again.”
“Their ability to monitor and surveil these individuals is under strain,” he said.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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