Juan Cole: Iraq War, Abu Ghraib Torture ‘Motivated’ Paris Killers

[su_right_ad]Suzie at Crooks and Liars links to Juan Cole, whose take is that the Charlie Hebdo terrorists were radicalized by U.S. actions in Iraq.

…in early 2003 at the age of 20, Sharif Kouashi and his brother Said started attending the al-Da`wa Mosque in the Stalingrad quarter. They had showed up with long hair, smoking, and lots of bad habits. The mosque gave them a sense of purpose. Sharif told his later lawyer, “Before, I was a delinquent.”

One member of the congregation at the al-Da`wa Mosque was Farid Benyettou. He was only a year older than Sharif, but was learned in Muslim texts, and taught informal classes at his apartment after prayers at the mosque. The boys began spending time with Benyettou. They stopped smoking, stopped getting high. At his apartment, Benyettou took them on the internet, and showed them images from Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. Sharif said, “It was everythng I saw on the television, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, all that, which motivated me.”

Benyettou ran a recruitment ring targeting young French Muslims that sent them to fight US troops in Iraq. They jogged in a park to get in shape and got rudimentary training in how to handle a Kalashnikov semi-automatic. They would tell their families that they were going to study in Syria. And they would spend some time in hard line Salafi schools. But then they would slip across the border into Iraq.

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D.B. Hirsch

D.B. Hirsch is a political activist, news junkie, and retired ad copy writer and spin doctor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.