At the trial of the November 13 attacks, the bureaucracy of barbarism – archyworldys

For more than six hours, diagrams and tables followed one another on the giant screen of the special court of assizes in Paris. After two months of hearing, the trial of the November 13 attacks entered the heart of the investigation on Thursday, November 18. Two agents from the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) dissected the functioning of the structure responsible for planning the attacks of the Islamic State (IS) organization and the course of some of its members. Names, decision-making circuits, hierarchical functions: the bureaucracy of terror told in graphics.

An amateur video, broadcast at the end of the hearing, tore this administrative glaze. We are near Aleppo, Syria, in February 2014. At the wheel of a blue pick-up, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, one of the killers of Parisian café terraces, has fun in front of the camera: “Before, we used to tow (…) big trailers full of luggage (…) to go on vacation (…) Now we are towing (…) the kouffar [mécréants]. “ The vehicle starts, dragging behind it a dozen corpses. His comrades in arms laugh: “Shoot, my brother, shoot these kouffar, look at this one with his Smurf face. ” Abaaoud will become, a few months later, an important framework of the “external operations” of the EI in Europe.

At the time of this film, the Belgian jihadist was still a simple fighter in the “immigrant brigade”, a battalion feared in the Aleppo region because of its barbarism. Its members, including twenty French speakers, multiply massacres, beheadings and “Executions of children” in the name of Sharia law. “This battalion was going to war as a summer camp”, explains the 1310SI investigator, reporting the words of a fighter’s wife. “Jihad is for them a source of pleasure and amusement”, she continues, noting “Childish behavior” and “Above all devoid of any humanity”.

“A real industry of attacks”

It is within this battalion that the IS will recruit some of its men of confidence to “project” attacks beyond its borders. Four actors of the November 13 attacks served in its ranks, explains the investigator: Abdelhamid Abaaoud, Najim Laachraoui, the artificer of the explosive belts of Paris and Saint-Denis, who will be detonated himself on March 22, 2016, in Brussels, and two suicide bombers from the Bataclan, Samy Amimour and Ishmael Omar Mostefaï.

If the organization drew abundantly from this “pool” of combatants with uncontrollable impulses to implement its campaign of attacks, the structure which oversaw its projects was methodically cold. “IS has set up a real industry of planned attacks”, explains investigator 948SI. This “industry” of terror had its central administration: the “foreign operations cell” (Copex), a secret structure of which no one knows the real name, created in 2014 by ISIS number two, Abu Mohammed Al-Adnani, died in 2016.

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