At the age of 19 Jejoen Bontinck saw jihad as a way of chatting up women. This member of the Islamist association Sharia4Belgium learnt the right Surah - verses of the Koran - to comfort Muslim women hurt by the hostility of a local population who, they believe, reject them because they wear a veil. This mixed-race young man made at least one of them believe that they were married according to the conventions of Islam so he could sleep with her. So once he was in Syria the reality of the war inevitably came as something of a shock. After a month in the training camp of what was not yet then officially called Islamic State, Jejoen was miserable and wanted to return to Belgium.
In the tent that he shared with other Belgian would-be jihadists a young man called “Abu Omar”, originally from Vilvorde in Belgium, confided in Jejoen that he, too, had “had enough” and wanted to return home. Moreover, he had a plan. A few days later, after nightfall on April 20th, 2013, Abu Omar set off with Jejoen carrying just a rucksack and a handgun. As they walked the two men chatted. Abu Omar asked Jejoen if, once they were back in Belgium, the latter could guarantee that he would not go to jail. Abu Omar was intimating that he thought his companion worked for the Belgian state, something he denied.
After a while a car approached the two deserters very slowly before pulling over. Two hooded, armed men got out and Jejoen Bontinck was handcuffed with his hands behind his neck. Abu Omar lay in the car, shaking his head, seemingly none too concerned.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The two fugitives were taken back to the training camp where Jejoen was unceremoniously bundled out of the car. The camp's boss, a Syrian sheikh, hit him on the forehead. The sheikh then picked up Abu Omar's handgun and pointed it at Jejoen, who was on his knees. The young Belgian closed his eyes and there was a loud bang. Jejoen then opened his eyes. The handgun with which Abu Omar was apparently planning to flee the organization had been loaded with blanks.
The sheikh roared with laughter then grabbed his victim around the neck and took him to a cell, congratulating the young man on his “soft skin”. Abu Omar was also much amused and Jejoen finally realised what had happened. “Abu Omar had set a trap for me,” he later said, during interrogation by Belgian investigators following his eventual return to Europe. This and other episodes in this investigation are based on a wide range of documents that Mediapart has had access to, including transcripts of interrogations of jihadists by French and Belgian authorities, witness statements by former hostages and prisoners and Mediapart's own interviews with ex-prisoners. Mediapart has agreed to preserve the anonymity of some former prisoners in their accounts of the torture they suffered.
It transpired that the jihadists had had their doubts about Jejoen. Four days before his 'escape' bid, the Belgian police had rounded up several members of Sharia4Belgium over their involvement in a network conveying fighters to Syria. The jihadists wondered if Jejoen could have been the cause of those arrests. He had spoken by phone to his father, telling him that he had slept in a villa. His father had then sent him a mysterious text in English: “The Israelis are coming back.”
So the dihadists had set up a classic counter-espionage sting, straight out of the Western spy handbook. In a 1963 manual the CIA described how to “trick” someone who was withholding information. It said: “A case officer previously unknown to the source … talks with the source under such circumstances that the latter is convinced that he is dealing with the opposition. The source is debriefed on what he has told the Americans and what he has not told them. The trick is likelier to succeed if the interrogatee has not been in confinement but a staged 'escape,' engineered by a stool-pigeon, might achieve the same end.”
In a cell at the training camp Jojoen Bontinck's feet were tied together with the strap of a Kalashnikov by Abu Omar and another jihadist, and the young man was hit with a piece of wood while being repeatedly questioned about the English text message. The following day he had a knife held to his throat and was called a “dog, hypocrite and spy”. German jihadists - described as “very muscular” - then whipped him until they drew blood. A year later a German hostage was still able to recall the “constellation of scars” on Jojoen's back. On August 9th, 2013, the Belgian was taken to the jihadists' prison in Aleppo. It was only then that the real interrogation began.
* * *
The first thing that Jojoen Bontinck noticed about Abu Ubaida al-Maghribi was his long willowy legs. Until then Jejoen had seen nothing as his eyes had been blindfolded while being taken to the interrogation room at the Islamic State's detention centre. This centre was located in the basement of the city's eye hospital, which was surrounded by a wall. It had one entrance plus several checkpoints on the approach to it.
The city's inhabitants did not know what went on in that building and did not hear the cries of the Syrian prisoners and European hostages (including four French journalists Édouard Élias, Didier François, Nicolas Hénin and Pierre Torrès) who were brought there in 2013. Jejoen shared the best room and at least had a mattress, rugs and some books. In other cells prisoners had to make do with sleeping on the floor, with some shackled to a radiator.
On their first day new arrivals were brought to a large room and lined up in front of Abu Ubaida. A jihadist pointed his assault rifle at each prisoner in turn, calling out the name of the organizations they were supposedly working for: “CIA!”, “FBI!”, “Mukhabarat!” [editor's note, the Syrian intelligence agency].
But it was Abu Ubaida who was in charge. This thin man who had dark skin, a long face, thin beard, big brown eyes and hollow cheeks, was usually hooded. He had a soft voice and refined vocabulary and spoke Arabic, English, German and French, all of them without an accent, according to prisoners who survived. Abu Ubaida made no threats and on this first encounter simply asked the prisoners to give their names and state why they were in Syria. He then addressed Jejoen in Flemish, noting the large number of texts the young Belgian had sent since arriving in the region. Abu Ubaida listened to the Belgian's answers in silence and then said they would speak later.
The bureaucrats of torture
Jihadists from all over the world were present at the Islamic State prison in Aleppo. There were French citizens such as Abu Mohamed and Abu Omar, Belgians such as Abu Ahmed and Abu Idriss (whom some hostages said was Ubeida's protégé), plus four Britons dubbed “The Beatles”. These included the man who was later known as 'Jihadi John'- real name Mohammed Emwazi – and who became notorious for carrying out executions on camera.
Former prisoners say that Abu Ubaida was the least ferocious and most civilised of the jailers. “This man was always very calm, never aggressive and never raised his voice,” Édouard Élias told police after his return. Nicolas Hénin said of him: “He was obsessed by details, he had fans put in the windows and made sure our cells were always lit so he could constantly monitor us.” Once when there was an “inspection” Abu Ubeida told the French prisoners that they had to ensure that their rooms were “spick and span”.
With Jejoen Bontinck, Abu Ubaida blew hot and cold. One day he told the Belgian that everything was “almost ready”, referring to his execution. This was after compromising documents had supposedly been found in the young man's belongings. On another occasion Jejoen was told he was being freed, and spent hours on a bench in a prison corridor before being returned to a cell.
Behind his good manners and urbanity, Abu Ubaida was engaged in a hunt for a mole. “Are you an agent for the DST?” he asked one journalist, referring to the predecessor of the French domestic intelligence agency the DGSI. “Do you work for the French intelligence services?”
The French war reporter Didier François had the personal phone numbers of then-president François Hollande and the head of the DGSE, France's overseas intelligence agency, programmed into his mobile phone. The journalist said this was simply because of his job as a journalist. Abu Ubaida did not immediately press him on this point. “He asked me to reflect carefully, and said he'd come back in a few days and that he'd like my answers to change,” the journalist later said.
Abu Ubaida sent the journalist back to his cell and summoned the photographer Édouard Élias, who worked with Didier François. The interrogator asked the photographer if his journalist colleague knew the French president and if he met with the head of the French secret services. At one point the interrogator pointed out that he had always treated the photographer well and never beaten him, and he accordingly advised him not to lie to him.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
The interrogations and details gleaned from other jihadists enabled the prisoners to get a fuller picture of their chief questioner. Abu Ubaida al-Maghribi was apparently a Dutch engineer of Moroccan origins who had two wives, the first of whom had been stuck in Turkey for a while, the second who was born in Syria. He had three children, the eldest of whom was seven, and they had joined him to “defend the cause”.
He was introduced to the hostages as the person in charge of the jihadist organisation's prison and court in Aleppo but his responsibilities seemed to extend much further. According to German jihadist Nils Donath, who later returned to Germany disillusioned with Islamic State and in 2016 was jailed for four-and-a-half years, it was Abu Ubaida who had the final say in the most sensitive deployments in locations such as Al-Bab and Manbij near Aleppo. Nicolas Hénin said he was supposedly the emir of the Moroccans inside IS and commanded 4,000 men. There is evidence from phone-tapping by the French authorities that he was important enough on occasions to have had a bodyguard. A note from Dutch intelligence dated August 13th, 2015, quotes a comment from Jejoen Bontinck to the effect that Abu Ubeida was “the emir of the Amniyat”: the Islamic State's internal security organisation.
* * *
As evening fell Salim Benghalem crossed the yard where lambs, ewes, goats and horses were wandering around and vaguely kept an ear out for the sounds of bombardments which, according to his wife, were then “really far away” but which over time “came closer”. This 35-year-old man, from Bourg-la-Reine in the southern suburbs of Paris, climbed the stairs to the first floor of the family home. These were some offices he had converted in the Sheikh Najjar industrial city north of Aleppo. He put his handgun down on top of the cupboard where there were already Turkish and American assault rifles and grenades, most of them unloaded and always stored high up “because of the children”. Each morning Salim Benghalem would leave the house, and each evening he would return. “You see, it's as if I were going to work!” he told his wife.
By day, Salim Benghalem was known to the prisoners in Aleppo as “Abu Mohamed” and acted as deputy to Abu Ubaida who had recruited him in June 2013. Several years earlier Benghalem had gone to the Yemen with Chérif Kouachi and had been asked by Al Qaeda to take part in the planned massacre at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, a mission he turned down. In Aleppo he was in charge of logistics and took part in interrogations but, according to his wife, could only administer two or three blows and was not allowed to torture anyone. “He didn't have the right to cut throats,” she added.
The Western hostages in Aleppo did not share this viewpoint as from their cells they could hear the sound of local prisoners being subjected to torture sessions that started at around 8pm and went on until around 4am. According to Nicolas Hénin a small group of French jihadists were “particularly involved” in these sessions. The prisoners were hit with batons and chains, given electric shocks and subjected to simulated drowinings. “The Syrian prisoners were terrified of getting tortured by jihadists who used to shout at them in French,” said Hénin. The Western hostages, whose very presence in Syria raised suspicions among the jihadists, knew their turn would come, sooner or later.
And when their turn came it involved blindfolds impregnated with tear gas wrapped around their eyes, their nails being pulled out with pliers, and being beaten and having a variety of objects put up their anus. The aim was to make the hostages crack and confess to working with intelligence agencies. One of the European hostages tried to commit suicide but his life was saved by his torturers. When he had recovered he took up jogging to survive, running a “cell marathon” - 7,000 laps of the confined space.
A Guantanamo on the Euphrates
The hostage was seated, his hands tied behind the backrest of his chair, while his interrogators demanded to know the full details of his life, including his studies and professional career. His feet were held in wooden manacles and he was beaten on the soles of his feet with a club. “I was hit each time they didn't like my answer,” he later recalled. When the first session of torture failed to produce the right answers the prisoner was taken outside the prison to a gantry where he was hoisted up by a chain running between his manacles and left in the sun for two hours. “I had no more strength or energy left, not even to swallow. I had no saliva left,” he recalled. He was then interrogated again over his links with the intelligence services and was hit in the throat, face and body. Finally a kick to the side of his head knocked him unconscious, briefly cutting short his suffering.
Once the hostage had been brought down and come round he was offered a glass of water but he was immediately threatened with another beating because he was using his left hand to hold the receptacle, which was “haram” - forbidden. When the hostage pointed out that as a result of the interrogation he could not use his right hand because it was swollen to twice its normal size and had turned blue, the torturer helped him drink with that injured right hand.
In the third interrogation session the jailers smashed the hostage's head against the tiles of his cell and then tied him up to the shower for eleven days, fed with half a cucumber and half a slice of bread per meal. On July 19th, 2013, Abu Ubaida al-Maghribi took him to the prison's torture cell in the middle of the night and continued with the same line about the hostage being a member of his country's secret services. Three times he denied his involvement, three times he was beaten, leading to a swollen eye, a bloody nose and a pain in his ribs that would last for eight weeks. Abu Ubaida looked at his watch, saw that the time was 2.10am, and the interrogation ended.
The man who inflicted the beatings that evening was Frenchman Abu Omar, who wore an explosive belt around his waist. As the interrogation ended he pointed his pistol to the hostage's forehead and told a fellow jihadist: “Go and get the camera! I'm going to kill him, we'll put it on YouTube!”
Abu Omar was later identified as the jihadist Mehdi Nemmouche, who was noted by the prisoners for his cruelty. He is currently in Belgium awaiting trial over the 2014 shooting at the Jewish Museum of Brussels that left four people dead. In Aleppo he used to threaten the prisoners with having their throats cut and also delighted in telling them: “You've left the Matrix”. This was a reference to the well-known science fiction film, and meant the prisoners had left behind their protective cocoon and were now at his mercy.
On one occasion, as Abu Omar prepared to beat a prisoner he put on a pair of gloves and said: “Look, I bought them just for you...” On another he chloroformed one hostage to make his cellmate believe he had died. “I killed him with a knife. And I'm going to decapitate you and put your head on your arse!” he told the cellmate. In common with other French-speaking jailiers Abu Omar would also make hostages kneel on the floor and simulate cutting their throat.
Abu Omar told the French prisoners: “It's an artist's life, man. It's beautiful, it's sad...”. When he was torturing prisoners he would hum “Renart sacripant, Renart chenapan” (“Rascal Renart, Scallywag Renart”) the theme tune of the French animated cartoon Moi Renart or the song Douce France by 20th century French singer Charles Trenet. He even hummed songs by the famous French singer Charles Aznavour, even if the jihadist said he would like to “waste him because he's a fucking Armenian”.
After singing one day Abu Omar confronted one of the hostages. “Weren't you expecting to hear an Al Qaeda mujahid singing?” he asked, speaking at a time when Islamic State had not yet distanced itself from Al Qaeda. The Frenchman even began filming some of the hostages going to the toilet before he was stopped by an Iraqi jihadist.
* * *
Anyone reading these accounts of torture may and should feel sickened. However, and this in no way justifies the actions or exonerates the perpetrators from their criminal responsibility for them, these terrible acts are also the product of our history. To one hostage who complained about his bad treatment, Abu Omar replied that he had more rights than prisoners in French prisons.
It would be easy to see these horrific acts simply as emanating from similar past practices in the Middle East. It is certainly true that the headquarters at the Mukhabarat or secret police in Jordan, from where the founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came, were nicknamed the “nail factory”. The Syrian Mukhabarat, too, was very active: a mujahid from a Chechen group told French judicial investigators how he had been tortured by Bashar Al-Assad's secret services with a television cable.
But above it was the human rights violations that took place under US president George W Bush, from the publication of photographs of the sexual humiliation that took place at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to stories of simulated drownings carried out at Guantanamo, which fed the jihadists' imagination. Inspired themselves by the KGB methods of the 1950s, the CIA's manuals on psychological torture were in turn adopted by the terrorists.
So the interrogation techniques authorised by the US Attorney General's office from 2002 to 2005 - “insult slaps”, “stress positions”, “sleep deprivation”, “dietary manipulation” - scarcely differed from those suffered by prisoners at Aleppo's eye hospital-turned-prison. Even the blows to the body administered by Abu Omar and others were similar to the “abdominal slaps” authorised by the US authorities.
A senior figure in French intelligence says: “The Islamic State henchmen used Western interrogation techniques, with a bit more force...” They also produced the same errors. Violence fails to elicit reliable information and under coercion prisoners will say something is true when it isn't. To counter this Abu Ubaida and his team also used more sophisticated counter-espionage techniques.
The source-checking unit
On his Facebook page he identified himself as “Abu Jihad al-Muhajir” and stated that he “worked with Islamic State in Iraq and Sham [editor's note, the Levant]”. He went to Syria four times and wondered around Europe with a digital version of the 'Manuel du petit terroriste', known as the Al Qaeda Handbook in English. None of this stopped him from being afraid in 2014; not in the torture room in Aleppo, but in a prison cell at Mons in Belgium where he had been questioned by the Belgian federal police. He begged the police officers not to let a former accomplice approach him at the law courts. “I also never want to have to cross paths in prison with other suspects in terrorism cases,” he told officers, fearful for his life. He was fully aware of the Islamic State's ability to carry out investigations in Belgium.
According to Abu Jihad, this was all down to one man: Khalid Zerkani. This Moroccan recruiter from the Molenbeek district of Brussels, nicknamed 'Father Christmas', recruited three of the future attackers involved in the November 13th, 2015 attacks in Paris. Before being sentenced in the spring of 2016 to 15 years imprisonment, he was the Islamic State's “source” in Brussels. Abu Jihad was well-placed to know. During his second stay in Syria he was at one time suspected of being a spy for Belgian intelligence. During questioning some of the French-speaking jihadists told him they were going to make contact with “Khalid” to do some checks on him.
* * *
The IS counter-intelligence agents carried out careful research on their ‘suspects’ before interrogations. Shortly after he was kidnapped, French photographer and journalist Édouard Élias overheard his captors listening, in a nearby room, to sound extracts on his computer of one of his reports. The Amniyat demanded prisoners’ passwords for email and social media accounts, checking back on correspondence and posts, studying through the hostages’ past, just as they did also with new recruits to the terrorist group.
French reporter Didier François, who was abducted with Élias in June 2013 and held for ten months, recalled how he was criticised by his captors for having joined the Europe 1 commercial radio station after 16 years with left-leaning French daily Libération, and how Nemmouche even reproached him for having never written articles that opposed France’s minimum sentencing laws.
Captured Danish photographer Daniel Rye Ottosen later recounted how he was accused of photographing the houses of djihadists, which Ottosen said in fact referred to photos he had taken of a mosque damaged by fighting. Two hostages, one German and the other Italian, recalled that during their interrogations there was a person who transcribed their ‘statements’.
Meanwhile, Swiss jihadist Abu Mahdi al-Swissry told of how he was submitted for questioning by “the interrogator of the secret services of the Dawla [Islamic State]” about his previous job and personal finances, and that his friends who had also joined up with the jihadists were questioned about him. He recalled how he had seen “a secret agent of the Dawla” rummage through the contents of his mobile phone.
Observations are added to the files on jihadist recruits during their activities with IS, and these are passed on to the Amniyat where, according to one former French jihadist, a “specialised group” studies them for any anomalies that might appear. In the hospital in Aleppo, Abu Obeida would record extracts of his interrogations on his mobile phone, noting any eventual incoherencies in replies to his questions.
If necessary, the IS services would carry out further investigations in Europe into suspect individuals.
* * *
Réda Bekhaled, who was arrested in September 2014 on suspicion of preparing a terrorist attack in the southern French city of Lyon, was in direct contact with jihadists in Syria, including several of his brothers. From his home in the Lyon suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin, he advised jihadist snipers on their operations via computer communications. “From a distance, Réda Bekhaled managed the movements of jihadists on Syrian territory,” noted a magistrate from the Paris public prosecutor’s anti-terrorist section in a report dated September 9th 2016, detailing contents found on his computer hard drive. “An essential relay for some jihadist combatants present in Syria, Réda Bekhaled was able to activate a sniper’s intervention when the combatants of the Islamic State were in difficulty and when a building held by Daech [Editor’s note: another name for Islamic State] risked falling into enemy hands.”
But Bekhaled also played a role in carrying out further investigations in France on behalf of IS interrogators. A lengthy study of his computer hard drive revealed that on October 7th 2013 he engaged in a conversation via Skype with his brother Rafik Bekhaled, who was at the time a jailkeeper and interrogator with the IS in al-Bab, north of Aleppo, alongside Salim Benghalem. Réda Bekhaled was asked to check up on a new recruit by the name of “Maxime”, and he told his brother he would send back his report “by message”. Réda appealed to his brother to tread “softly” with the new recruit, who he called “Max”, saying “wait for the proof”, and “do it cleanly”.
Over the following days there were more exchanges, during which Réda said he needed more time to “nose around” to establish the credibility of Maxime, but mentioned his doubts whether the latter was “clean”. Réda said his informer was a female cousin who was married to someone close to Maxime, and that his investigations needed more time. “For the prisoner, I need time,” he told his brother. “Tell them not to do something foolish.” Rafik replied that he had already questioned Maxime once, and added that he had recorded everything that he knows about the “From’”, slang for “fromage” (“cheese” in French), which was a term used to designate French nationals. Five days after that conversation, Rafik Bekhaled sent his brother Maxime’s email address, which was that of one “Maxime Hauchard”.
In the end, the investigations found nothing to doubt the intentions of the aspiring jihadist, and one year later he appeared in an IS video, broadcast in November 2014, alongside 17 other jihadists filmed decapitating 18 soldiers from the army loyal to Bashar al-Assad. An international arrest warrant was subsequently issued in Hauchard’s name.
* * *
Speaking before a parliamentary commission of inquiry on May 24th 2016, Patrick Calvar, the then head of the French internal intelligence services (the DGSI), underlined that “it is particularly difficult, as you can imagine, to find volunteers to help us by travelling to Syria or Iraq”. A senior member of French intelligence, whose identity is withheld here, told Mediapart: “The problem is not so much to infiltrate someone, but rather how will they send back to us the information gleaned? By phone or by internet? It’s not even worth thinking about. There remains for us the old method of dead letter boxes, but that’s complicated. It has to be recognised that the Islamic State services are effective. They carry out good intelligence beforehand, examine the volunteers on their arrival. Their cadres are very intelligent.”
Hostages have spoken of hearing their captors discussing the policies of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, about the supposed perversions of democratic society, and comparing the value of university diplomas in Belgium and France.
One of those who might have had an opinion about the merits of Belgian higher education was Najim Laachraoui, who organised the transfer of IS prisoners, on January 19th 2014, from Aleppo to Raqqa. Moroccan-born Laachraoui, whose nom de guerre was Abu Idriss, was brought up in Brussels where, according to Belgian press reports, he studied engineering at university before dropping out, going on to briefly follow a course in electromechanics. Laachraoui died in March 2016 when he and another suicide bomber blew themselves up at Brussels airport.
Back in January 2014, Laachraoui, had changed his appearance from that, unkempt, during his initial period in Syria, where he arrived from Belgium in 2013. “He changed his look,” said one of the former French hostages. “Before, he resembled a lowly guard. But then, he was wearing a super-jumpsuit with pockets, a belt of explosives. He was dressed like a headman.”
His driver in the transfer convoy was known as Abu Ahmed, who Western intelligence agencies believe was the nom de guerre of Oussama Atar, who held joint Belgian-Moroccan nationality. “He put himself about as the driver for Abu Idriss, but I think he had a more important role,” recounted another former hostage. “When Abu Idriss got annoyed because he appeared lost, [Abu Ahmed] was calmer, and looked like he took control of the situation.” According to the accounts of former hostages, Abu Idriss and Abu Ahmed had taken over the role held by Abu Ubaida.
The mystery surrounding Abu Ubaida
The jihadist adventure of Belgian volunteer Jejoen Bontinck ended in the autumn of 2013, at a bus stop on the edge of territory controlled by what months later be called the Islamic State, from where he rode a coach towards the Turkish border. Shortly before, at the ophthalmology hospital in Aleppo, Abu Ubaida al-Maghribi had come to the conclusion that the young Belgian was not an infiltrated spy, but rather a coward, and ordered him to do guard tour and lookout duties. Taking advantage of little surveillance of his movements, he fled back to Belgium where he was arrested and tried, and in early 2015 he was handed a 40-month suspended jail sentence.
But many suspected spies were shown no indulgence. In the football stadium in Raqqa, the headquarters of the Amniyat, a commission sat every Friday to decide on the fate of prisoners. Two reports by the French domestic intelligence service, the DGSI, recount how, since 2015, IS appoints children as the executioners of those designated as spies. One IS video shows a 12-year-old boy, identified as originally coming from the southern French city of Toulouse, shooting dead at point-blank range a man accused of being an agent for the Israeli secret services, the Mossad. Other evidence shows preadolescent children took part in decapitations organised by IS in 2016.
One of Rafik Bekhaled’s wives would later recount how she saw, in the city of Manbij, north-east of Aleppo, “cut-off heads [...] placed along the edges of a roundabout” and, elsewhere, “skewered” corpses. Another witness account of such atrocities was given by the wife of a jihadist who was taken by her husband to an address in al-Bab, a town situated between Aleppo and Manbij, where he showed her the remains of two men who had been crucified and decapitated.
***
Western hostages held inside the ophthalmology hospital in Aleppo identified a Belgian jihadist, who, unlike so many other foreigners, did not adopt an Arab kunya name to disguise his identity. “Iliass the Belgian” dressed in a jellaba robe and babouches slippers rather than military garments, according to the hostages, who added that he was never threatening and even brought them extra rations of food at night, warning them not to tell the other guards.
Brussels Islamic preacher Iliass Azaouaj travelled to Syria in early 2013, which the Belgian press would later report was a secret mission to convince Belgian jihadists to return home. In April 2013 he was detained and interrogated by a jihadist group, which claimed he had repented after confessing to being in the pay of the Belgian and Moroccan authorities. After repenting, he was ordered to take part in a suicide mission, but when he triggered his belt of explosives, nothing happened. It was apparently a test of his sincerity. Azaouaj was then sent to Aleppo, where he was given minor duties by IS. In early September 2014, reports on social media announced he had been executed by decapitation for spying activities.
Abu Ubaida was reported to have suffered the same fate during the summer of 2014.
***
According to a DGSI document, Abu Ubaida al-Maghribi, “presented as one of the heads of Islamic State security, was reportedly executed [...] for treason during the summer of 2014”. A website of Jordanian news outlet Al-Kawn published a photo it claimed was his corpse, while Belgian journalist Guy Van Vlierden, from the daily La Dernière Heure, writing on his blog in January this year cited Dutch reports that the true identity of Abu Ubaida al-Maghribi was Mohamed Amine Boutahar. Van Vlierden referred to Jejoen Bontinck’s testimony after he returned to Belgium, describing Abu Ubaida as a Dutch national of Moroccan origin. He also cited the testimony of German jihadist Nils Donath who said Abu Obeida was executed, on the orders of the then-newly appointed governor of Aleppo, Abu Ayoub al-Ansari, in front of members of the IS internal security, and that his body was thrown into a well.
A Dutch intelligence service report about Abu Ubaida al-Maghribi’s execution noted, “According to diverse sources […], he was suspected of having supplied information to the intelligence service of a European country,” in an apparent reference to Britain’s MI6.
Mohamed Amine Boutahar, the son of a former Moroccan consul to the Netherlands, was born on April 4th 1983 in Morocco. Before he left for Syria on April 1st 2013, he had worked for the Moroccan consulate in the Dutch city of Utrecht. A report by a regional branch of Dutch intelligence noted how Boutahar’s move to Syria, where it said he was engaged “in combat”, was an embarrassment for the Moroccan authorities and the Utrecht consulate given his status as a consulate worker and the son of a former consul.
Amid the smoke and mirrors of the dark world of intelligence there are only hypotheses, based on documents from the various national security services and justice systems, about Boutahar’s activities. If he was in fact infiltrated into the IS ranks, information he would have provided might explain why Mehdi Nemmouche, now awaiting trial in Belgium on charges of shooting dead four people in the Brussels Jewish Museum in May 2014, had the impression that he had been tailed during a trip he made to Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand in February 2014. It might also explain why French national Salim Benghalem was to be included on the US State Department’s list of most dangerous terrorists in September 2014, at a time when the French intelligence services believed he was no more than a lowly jihadist. It could conceivably be also why the DGSI report announcing Abu Ubaida’s death was added to ten days after it was first written with the names of 28 suspected IS jail keepers that were to be submitted to former French hostages, instead of the usual catalogue of about 700 identified French jihadists. Finally, if he was indeed an infiltrated spy, it might be an explanation as to why the Western intelligence agencies have been tragically less effective since the time of his reported death in the summer of 2014.
“After Ubaida’s arrest, restructuring was put in place,” said ex-German jihadist Nils Donath during interrogation. “The situation then deteriorated [...] the methods of the IS police were hardened.” The Kuwait-born British jihadist Mohammed Emwazi, who became dubbed “Jihadi John”, gained worldwide infamy for the executions, in the months following Abu Ubaida’s reported execution, of six Western hostages held by IS. Meanwhile, Salim Benghalem, who had told his wife he would rather remain a subordinate, did then become an emir. According to a confidential French report, Benghalem was revealed to be “a sadistic torturer”, adopting the names of Azzam al-Jazzar – “Azzam the butcher” – and Dhabbah al-Kafara – “the cutter of the throats of miscreants”.
Mehdi Nemmouche became the first IS jihadist to strike in Europe with his shooting attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels (which he denies involvement in). Najim Laachraoui (nom de guerre Abu Idriss), played the role of IS explosives expert in the November 13th 2015 terrorist attacks in and around Paris and the March 22nd 2016 attacks in Brussels. Oussama Atar, known also as Abu Ahmed, is suspected of being the coordinator of both attacks which, according to several well-informed sources, were supervised by Ali Moussa al-Shawak (Abu Loqman), who also went by the name of Abu Ayoub al-Ansari. It was he who ordered the execution of Abu Obeida.
Earlier this year, Mediapart learned that a Western intelligence organization had received information suggesting Abu Ubaida was in fact still alive. However, several well-informed sources contacted about that rumour dismissed the idea and maintained he was dead. In October last year, Uluk Ultas, a Turkish academic and specialist on Syrian rebel movements, who is also the director of Turkish think tank SETA, told British online journal The Independent that, “I have spoken to fighters who say that al-Maghribi isn’t dead after all and has been seen around. Maybe he’s being held as a bargaining counter for when Raqqa falls – who knows?”
A report in 2015 by Utrecht police and which Mediapart has gained access to, details a conversation between city police officers and the father of a young woman who had travelled to Syria to join the ranks of IS. The father said that his daughter had told him one of her neighbours in Syria was a woman whose husband reportedly once worked at the Moroccan consulate in Utrecht. Meanwhile, Dutch intelligence admitted they were unable to authenticate the photo supposedly showing the corpse of Mohamed Amine Boutahar because no other photo of him was available.
This web of contradictory statements and reports further fuels speculation whether Boutahar was indeed a double, or even triple agent.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter and Graham Tearse