In January 2015, two heavily armed brothers stormed the offices of a weekly satire magazine called Charlie Hebdo and opened fire. With military discipline, they killed eleven people, injured eleven more, then shot and killed a national police officer outside the building. France deployed the army, and the brothers took hostages, but they were shot and killed before the end of the day.
The shootings shocked people in the country and beyond. Nearly four million people demonstrated in France, the phrase Je suis Charlie, “I am Charlie,” in solidarity with the magazine, ricocheted across the Internet, and though the magazine typically sold fewer than a hundred thousand copies, the next issue sold almost eight million, and in half a dozen languages. The world mourned for Charlie Hebdo.
Ayoub El-Khazzani did not.
Ayoub resented this reaction.
On social media he posted old photos of the violence colonial France inflicted upon Africa. He said France was a terrorist state for what it had done. He posted videos explaining theories that these attacks by Muslims were faked, just hoaxes meant to marginalize Muslims yet again. Ayoub proclaimed, “I am not Charlie Hebdo.” He had no sympathy for a magazine that mercilessly insulted his religion. That was just picking on the weak. He began posting videos of Saudi sheiks of the strict Salafi tradition preaching, on sites devoted to religion.
And, still mostly lonely, he spent the rest of his time reading up on love, how to fashion his hair, how to lose weight.
More than a year after going off the radar in France, on May 10, 2015, Ayoub El-Khazzani popped back up. He was in Berlin.
He was boarding a Germanwings flight to Istanbul,1 the gateway to jihad in Syria.
Because he was under an S-Card, his movement was caught and the intel was passed to Spanish intelligence the next day.
Security services lost the trail after he landed in Turkey,2 but there was little doubt where he was headed. Syria was a place where fighters were trained to join the jihad there or, ever more frequently, trained and then sent home to carry out attacks on European soil.
On June 4, he returned to Europe on a flight from Antakya, a Turkish city on the Syrian border.3
He went to Belgium.4 Belgium was a country with the highest concentration of jihadi volunteers in Europe.5
He stayed with a sister above a Carousel minimart in Molenbeek, a district of Brussels,6 where he was surrounded by people like him; its population was largely Muslim, and also largely of Moroccan extraction.
It also had a thriving illegal arms trade. It had the highest unemployment in the city. It was crowded and graffitied.7 It provided ample disaffection for those on the path to violence, or who had traveled far and wide in search of opportunity but had found none.
And it provided weapons. It was weapons from this slum that were used in Paris in the attack on a kosher market, and at the shootings at the Jewish Museum in Belgium.8
That summer, while Spencer, Anthony, and Alek prepared excitedly for their EuroRail adventure, Ayoub went on a backpacking trip of his own,9 traveling between Belgium and Germany, as well as Austria, France, and Andorra. He traveled, each time, by train.10
Then, just as Spencer was leaving Portugal, and Anthony and Alek were saying goodbye to their parents, Ayoub finally called his. He had not spoken with his father for a year and a half.11
It’s August 21. It is hot and humid, with little relief. A nearly windless day.12 Ayoub purchases a burner phone13 and activates it.
Ayoub leaves his sister’s home. He walks up to the roundabout with a small park in the middle but no grass, just pigeons. Up Rue Piers, where he enters the Ossenheim metro stop, going underground just before the street meets a field with young men playing soccer. He rides past the new car washes, a thinning, littered woodland, abandoned and hollowed-out automotive parts warehouses slowly filling up with bottles and old dolls and car tires.
Past the giant slaughterhouse recently converted into a covered playground. A whole tour of urban decay in less than five minutes.
He comes back up at the Clemenceau station by the school with the faux graffiti wall. Vivre ensemble, it says. “Live together.” And Paix, for “Peace.” As he moves through a park with public exercise equipment bolted to the ground all around him, the South Tower rises nearly forty stories high right in front of him, a giant gleaming beacon emerging from the train station. As he makes his way toward it, he moves through another area full of firearms; the region around the station is a widely known hub for the black-market weapons trade.14 The whole country of Belgium is, really. A storied history of firearms manufacturers, like FN Herstal,15 combined with lax restrictions and the country’s status as a transit hub for people fleeing other wars allowed Belgium to become a country saturated with firearms. Then after a wave of violent crimes hit, new gun control laws were enacted, but the weapons were already there; their sale continued by simply moving underground, where they combined with a wash of black-market weapons flowing in since the Balkan Wars. As people fled to Belgium from the collapsing Soviet Union, a community of Balkan expatriates grew, many of whom knew how to access old Soviet munitions reserves back home. Which turned out to be veritable gold mines.16 So by the time the government finally tried to crack down, it was far too late. There were millions of unregistered weapons already in circulation; they’d simply moved to the black market.17 There could be no better place to assemble an arsenal without authorities knowing.
He enters the station, angled glass with white lettering, French station name in one direction, Dutch in another.18 He is six stops and less than two miles from the Maelbeek metro station, where twenty people will die from an explosion during a coordinated ISIS attack eight months later.
Big yellow posters list times and destinations. He asks for a ticket to Paris. The clerk offers him a seat on the next train, originating in Amsterdam at 11:17, and the one after that, the 13:1719 to Paris.
Ayoub decides he will wait for a later train, #9364. He does not say why. He does not appear to have a reason, though Thalys employees know the Friday #9364 is one of the busiest trains on the route. It’s the end of the week, it’s right at closing time, and August is high tourist season. That train is usually packed. And because in the summer Thalys attracts young people on short-term contracts looking for spending money or a foot in the door, the train’s staff that day was both younger and less experienced than usual.
Ayoub pays €149 in cash and the clerk hands him a ticket for first class on Thalys #9364. The 15:17 to Paris, originating in Amsterdam.
He proceeds to the platform, a nexus of old and new. Gleaming red trains whine into the station looking like long rocket ships, passing antique-style roman-numeral clocks, a gesture to the old days of rail transport. Backlit billboards show smiling white vacationers enjoying their holidays all around the continent. Above Ayoub the roofs are the same old corrugated metal that covered the slums in cities he lived in, holding back rain when it came but making it sound angry, pounding down like the sky itself wanted in. Sheets of metal just like the ones his father collected and dealt for scrap. Gauzy, filtered sunlight falls through transparent seams in the roof, as train #9364 pulls into the station.
Ayoub approaches.
He walks past an elegant young woman, tall and thin and blond and draped in burgundy fabric that matches the train, matches her heels. A train attendant, on a crew change.
Ayoub is not focused on her. Ayoub is about to win glory, and he carries power in his backpack. He has a 9mm Luger semiautomatic pistol. He also has a blade from a box cutter, a bottle of gasoline, a hammer, a backpack with eight fully loaded magazine cartridges, nearly three hundred rounds of ammunition, and a side-folding Draco AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifle with a slant-cut muzzle and a collapsible butt.
He boards in first class.
The stairs under the train doors retract; the train managers radio to each other, and the train begins to move. It happens without sound. Like the world has tipped just a little and the train has begun to roll downhill. The hum of the engine kicks in, but it is faint and feels far away. It is astoundingly quiet. Even the people speak in hushed tones, as if discussing something grave or private. The loudest sound is the pneumatic hiss of the doors between the cars opening and closing, as confused passengers finally find their assigned seats.
The train rolls out onto the tributary of tracks multiplying in front of the station. It picks up speed, passes the junkyards, moves onto a smoother track, picks up more speed. Within minutes of leaving the station, it is traveling at over 150 miles per hour.
Ayoub leaves his seat and enters the carriage-twelve lavatories.
He plays a YouTube video on the phone he has just activated; on the screen in his hand, a speaker incites the faithful to take up arms in the name of the prophet.
Ayoub removes his shirt.
He straps the backpack and Draco machine gun across his bare torso.
When he is finally ready, he opens the door and walks out.
He sees something he has not anticipated: a curly-haired man seems to be waiting in line to use the toilet.
Ayoub feels a shift in weight on his shoulders—a second man has grabbed him from behind, and now the curly-haired man is grabbing, twisting, torquing the machine gun;20 Ayoub feels it slip out of his grasp and now the curly-haired man has the gun and Ayoub reaches for his pistol and gets his finger over the trigger guard.
A crack echoes through the carriage. Glass shatters. The men leap backward. The machine gun clatters to the carpet and the curly-haired one crumples; in an instant a bullet has passed through his shoulder blade, pierced his lung, and struck his collarbone.
“I’m hit,” he says. He has locked eyes with his wife, and is staring at her through the seats.21 “I’m hit.”22
He is no longer holding the machine gun.
Ayoub picks up the weapon and realizes he has space around him. “It’s over,” the fallen man says. Legs and arms are in motion, bodies sprinting in different directions, the pistol like a starting gun, Ayoub is under way. One man has taken off toward the back of the train, the train attendant is sprinting toward the front, past the letters on the door panel, thalys—welcome to our world, and Ayoub swings the Draco forward and decides to follow the attendant. Ayoub is in control. It is working again. He has a bag full of weapons and a train car full of unarmed targets, enough ammo for all or at least many of them. He is in power, he is winning justice for the weak and oppressed, he will make this country bleed. There are more voices now, and a flash of sky blue23 growing bigger in his vision. A ridiculous sight, a body running toward him. This is surprising, but the man is an easy target and he’s running down a perfect shooting gallery: the train car boxes him in, the man has no cover, seems to have no weapon, is not threatening. Ayoub barely has to aim. He lowers the weapon at the man and pulls the trigger.
The gun doesn’t go off.
He pulls the trigger again.
The man is close, the gun’s not going off, the one thing everyone knows about this kind of gun is that they never jam, he tries to cycle it but he’s flustered now because the unjammable gun seems to be jammed so he grabs the wrong lever and accidentally activates the safety, now the trigger won’t move, and he’s out of time. The man is almost on top of him so he swings the weapon up into the man’s face just as the man arrives but the man has so much momentum that Ayoub is driven back and just as he’s coming back off his feet there’s a gap so he can see two more bodies, a shorter man in the red-and-blue stripes of the Bayern Munich soccer club and a tall man with skin like his, and then Ayoub is on the ground and the gun is gone from his hands, and he begins to fight.