AYOUB

Ayoub followed his father to Europe in 2007.

Ayoub’s father was trying to make a go of it in the capital, so that’s where Ayoub went to join him, but he began getting in trouble.

In 2009, he was arrested on suspicion of selling hashish.¹ He wasn’t a user, there just wasn’t much else to do for money.

And anyway, he was not extreme in his faith; he never minded sitting with the people who got high. Mostly, he considered himself an athlete, five-aside soccer his favorite pastime.

In 2013, the family moved down to Spain to the mouth of the River of Honey, Rio de la Miel, a city called Algeciras on the bay of Gibraltar.

It was a place of uncomfortable contrasts, a weigh station for oil traveling across the Atlantic, where small fishing skiffs bobbed next to giant cargo vessels. A rich fishery but also one of the busiest transshipment points in the world, a place where millions of dollars’ worth of commerce occurred in the space of every second, and yet Ayoub lived among poor immigrants, and almost half the city was unemployed.² Ships passed with thousands of tons of cargo, but in Ayoub’s neighborhood there was little to do for money besides sell scrap, sell hashish. All around was natural beauty, but Ayoub lived in decades-old dilapidated public housing with peeling white paint.³

Legend held that there was once a giant 150-foot statue of the prophet Muhammad, one theory being that it was built to warn the Muslims of an impending Christian invasion.⁴ Another was that the statue protected the land with magic, with winds and currents, and only when the giant prophet was toppled could ships pass and international trade begin.

Modern Algeciras was a place in whose alleys and side streets you could become lost and anonymous, yet was situated in a province known for the proliferation of watchtowers. The place Ayoub moved to had once been a merchant paradise; the towers were places from which merchants could watch people and cargo arriving. In Ayoub’s family there were merchants too. His father sold trash. Ayoub sold hashish. Each dealt only in the things he himself didn’t use. They had no watchtowers. From the housing project in which they lived, they could not see the people and cargo arriving, mostly from America.

Ayoub was a normal young man; he took advantage of the beaches with other friends⁵ and played soccer often, but like most others his age, he was constantly looking for work. In 2012 he went back to Morocco, and was arrested again on suspicion of selling drugs.⁶ When he came back to Spain, he was done. He wanted out of the drug world.⁷ He’d had enough, and wanted something better.

This city though, Algeciras, was a major transit point between two continents with a huge unemployed underclass—in that way, a city tailor-made for drug trafficking. Staying out of it was hard; it was hard to find other sources of income when an obvious one was always there, but Ayoub was trying.⁸ He sought discipline in prayer, found some structure there, and began worshipping with a half dozen different congregations.⁹ Near his home, in the space between a market¹⁰ and an immigration detention center,¹¹ his father helped convert an auto repair shop into another mosque.¹² It followed the concept of Taqwa,¹³ which means “God fearing,” the idea being that followers must always have the Almighty in mind. Always be on guard, lest they do anything that would displease God.

It was a good fit for a young man trying to avoid a world of crime around him. It was a mosque in which men and women prayed together.

But Spanish police believed it to be a threat. They had it under surveillance the moment it opened, and the moment Ayoub stepped inside it he brought upon himself a new problem, though it was one he was not yet aware of: He was placed under surveillance, and marked as a possible threat.¹⁴

He could not know how this mark would stick with him. He did not know how it would affect his future. He kept working hard; he stayed out of trouble. When he wasn’t praying, he worked in a teahouse.

He lost that job too.

He couldn’t find another.

Ayoub was seeking refuge in religion just as, twenty-five hundred miles¹⁵ due east, in the direction he prayed, there were rumblings that would affect his own life and millions of others. Two groups of Islamic extremists had merged. One a division of the Syrian resistance called the Nusra Front, the other calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq; together, they rebranded as the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria, or ISIS. Their mission was so bold that for a long time they were dismissed as dreamers. Other radical groups rejected them as fantastical, and even Al Qaeda cut ties with them. What ISIS wanted was no less than to bring about an actual Islamic state. They wanted to restore the caliphate from over a millennium ago. And just as Ayoub was looking for a way out of the drug game, ISIS was becoming a movement that demanded to be taken seriously.

In January, it actually took over a city, Fallujah, frighteningly close to the capital of Iraq.

A few weeks later, it took an even bigger city, one on the north bank of the Euphrates, called Raqqa. This was important not just because Raqqa was a major metropolis, and not just because ISIS had effectively erased the border between Syria and Iraq. The city had been the capital of the Abbasid caliphate, twelve hundred years before, when the Muslim world was the center of science, discovery, fairness, and order.

ISIS was holding the old capital of the state they sought to restore.

The idea of an Islamic state was beginning to seem not just possible, but imminent.

As it made a stronger and stronger case that it could conceivably achieve its goals, it offered disenchanted youth everywhere a chance to be part of a world-changing cause. The places it fought were rich with people easy to demonize. In Syria, freedom-loving rebels were underequipped and poorly organized, trying to stave off a brutal dictator who sent a professional military to push barrel bombs out of helicopters and onto children.

The ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, issued a recruiting call.

His message was calibrated precisely for young men struggling to find meaning. He wanted to inspire “volcanoes of jihad”¹⁶ all over the world, which would drive away the infidels whose meddling in Muslim lands had poisoned them, and turned them into places where honest young men couldn’t find dignity. If the meddlers could be driven out, the world of justice and peace and discovery—the caliphate—would emerge again.

Many ISIS fighters were as interested in booze and women as stereotypical American infantrymen, so while becoming a holy warrior may have been for some a way to serve their faith, for many it was just their only path to glamour. Baghdadi offered the sign-and-drive equivalent of purpose: no money down, bad credit, no credit, just initial here and welcome aboard. He provided rules, a project, a way to be part of something bigger than oneself, a thing to tell girls about.

The imams loyal to ISIS were skilled at taking in the complaints of each young man and fitting them into a narrative of persecution against all Muslims. This was a narrative that would resonate immediately with young men like Ayoub, who had to either accept he was not very successful at anything because he was not very good at anything, or choose to believe the world was rigged against him.

Or at least, in Ayoub’s case, that Europe was rigged against him. And Europe was taking on a new significance for ISIS.

ISIS wanted to fight its enemy not just in Iraq and Syria and other hot zones in the Middle East, but “even outside of it if possible, so as to disperse the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and thus drain it to the greatest extent possible.” The reasoning was simple. “If a tourist resort that the Crusaders patronize . . . is hit, all of the tourist resorts in all of the states of the world will have to be secured by the work of additional forces, which are double the ordinary amount, and a huge increase in spendings.”¹⁷

Drain their blood, drain their wallets. That’s why it emphasized that “to be effective, attacks should be launched against soft targets that cannot possibly be defended to any appreciable degree.”¹⁸

Targets, in other words, like passenger trains.

Some countries stood as obvious choices. Places where the message would resonate, and where foot soldiers might be found. France, for example, had the largest Muslim minority on the continent, but the Muslim community there was mostly an underclass. They made up almost 70 percent of the prison population. There were nearly 11,500 known radical Islamists in the country, according to French surveillance data,¹⁹ and regard for ISIS was high. If ISIS wanted a place away from the Middle East, with a potential supply of both young recruits and soft, symbolic targets, they could hardly do better.

France presented itself as an obvious new theater of war.

In 2014, Ayoub’s new job took him to France.

A subsidiary of the telecommunications company Lycamobile was recruiting from Ayoub’s neighborhood, and they offered him work.

It was his first break. Finally, gainful employment and a chance to leave his parents’ home.²⁰ The company gave him a polo shirt with a logo, a cart of cheap gifts, pamphlets to hand out on the street, and dispatched him to a part of Paris called Saint-Denis.²¹

There was excitement to be had there, especially for a soccer fan like Ayoub. The national stadium was in Saint-Denis; the French national soccer team held their home matches not far from where he worked.

It was also ghettoized and postindustrial.²² Ayoub had been plucked out of Spain and plopped down in a largely Muslim area many outsiders considered too dangerous to enter at night, and which the French ministry of the interior designated a “priority security zone.”²³ He was living in a part of Paris with half a million Muslims, 40 percent unemployment, and the highest violent crime rate in the country.²⁴ It was a place where police did little to protect the local population, or even to punish them, sometimes pulling out entirely for fear of sparking riots.

In Saint-Denis, the symbols of authority were pulled from the people and positioned as enemies.

Ayoub tried to get by, living among others who were in various ways like him; other Muslims, other North Africans, other émigrés from former French colonies.

It was a seasonal gig; he had a six-month contract. But he felt good about it; he thought it was a good job,²⁵ and his father thought it was a healthy chance for a new beginning after the boy’s youth spent more or less adrift.²⁶ It wasn’t a glamorous job. It was going out on the street to give away cheap trinkets and sign up other Moroccans for SIM cards. But he was a good employee.

And because he was there to appeal to the Moroccan expatriates, it was a chance to take pride in his own culture.

In France, Ayoub was quiet. He arrived at work via public transport,²⁷ spent the day dutifully putting up posters, handing out flyers, trying to sign people up,²⁸ and going home. His employers found him diligent; he was finding his way.²⁹

A month³⁰ into his new life, Spanish authorities³¹ who’d been surveilling Ayoub’s mosque back in Spain learned that he’d gone to France. They alerted the French authorities.³² Ayoub was placed under a state security “S form,” which gave authorities legal clearance to spy on him.³³ A month after French authorities got this intel, Ayoub was dismissed from his job.³⁴

The company’s explanation was that they’d found his working papers³⁵ were out of order,³⁶ and didn’t believe the address he had on file was correct.³⁷ But back home, when they heard the news, Ayoub’s parents were livid. His father thought the company was criminal for treating people like that.³⁸ Still, Ayoub had no recourse. He was now stuck in a foreign country. He was under surveillance, without family, without an income, desperate for a way to make a living.³⁹ He was a young man without a job or legal status in a country where Muslims were an underclass, where they filled most of the space in most of the prisons, and where there were thousands of known radical Islamists.⁴⁰

With apparently nowhere else to go, he stayed in Saint-Denis⁴¹ for a few more months. Soon he stopped calling his father.

Then authorities lost track of Ayoub El-Khazzani.