Re-examining the 2015 ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Attack
Re-examining the 2015 ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Attack
Al-Qaeda claimed it, but the evidence can be read another way
The staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were massacred in their office in Paris on 7 January 2015. Conventionally, responsibility is assigned to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), but there is an alternative, the evidence for which is set out in this Twitter thread by @Ayei_Eloheichem, namely that the Islamic State (IS) is really responsible.
The Charlie Hebdo atrocity was carried out by Saïd Kouachi and his younger brother, Chérif Kouachi. The attack was quickly claimed by AQAP, though in a slightly unorthodox way that led to U.S. intelligence doubting the authenticity of the claim, and this is just the start of a fact pattern where—even if you do not end up agreeing with Ayei’s thesis—it has to be admitted there is something wrong with the conventional story.
The most obvious complication in the AQAP-did-it narrative is that on 9 January—the day the Kouachis were killed—a second attack took place, the nearly-five-hour siege of the Hypercacher kosher supermarket, during which four Jews were murdered. The attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, a Frenchman of Malian heritage, was a declared IS operative and the video released by IS after his death—following the template of other IS attacks—showed him pledging allegiance (bay’a) to the “caliph”; obviously it was filmed before his death and is conclusive proof Coulibaly acted at the behest of IS Centre. IS’s claim through its usual media channels was reinforced by the claim of an IS cleric, Abu Saad al-Ansari, in a sermon in Mosul. Ayei also draws attention to the evidence, which emerged later, that one of IS’s Amn al-Kharji guides, Boubaker al-Hakim (Abu Muqatil al-Tunisi), had been instrumental in the Hypercacher attack.1
When AQAP made its more formal claim a few days later, it argued that the confluence of these events was “a coincidence” (the one unconvincing explanation) “because of the men’s relationships with each other”, which is question-begging. Because what is most notable is that the Kouachis and Coulibaly were friends.
A key figure in Chérif’s path to jihadism was Farid Benyettou (Abu Abdallah), who was close to Al-Hakim, the IS official who seems to have handled Coulibaly and certainly did oversee the exfiltration of Coulibaly’s girlfriend, Hayat Boumeddiene, after the January 2015 attacks. Benyettou and Al-Hakim ended up on opposite sides of the Qaeda-IS schism after 2014, but Chérif, as part of their joint French network in the early 2000s, had tried to join IS in Iraq when IS was an Al-Qaeda affiliate. In prison in the later 2000s, Chérif and Coulibaly fell under the sway of Djamel Beghal, and on the outside, after their release, Chérif and Coulibaly had remained in close contact since at least 2010; both also remained in contact with Beghal, who was still in prison, and Chérif gradually drew Saïd further into jihadism. Even in this early phase, Chérif and Coulibaly were detected talking in code about breaking Beghal out of prison and planning a “marriage” (terrorist attack).
It is simply impossible to believe that the Kouachis and Coulibaly ended up carrying out nearly simultaneous attacks within three miles of each other with no coordination, and Ayei digs up testimony from Coulibaly precisely on this point.
Speaking to French television station BFMTV in the hours between the Kouachis being killed and his own death, Coulibaly said that when he shot dead policewoman Clarissa Jean-Philippe a day earlier, on 8 January, this was “coordinated” with the Kouachi brothers and that it was IS, through him, who “gave money to the Kouachi brothers to buy weapons and other equipment”. (8 January 2015 was the day IS’s media apparatus first mentioned the Charlie Hebdo attack, praising the Kouachis as “heroes” on IS’s Al-Bayan radio station.)
In a video released two days after the trio had been killed, Coulibaly reiterates the claim that IS financed the Kouachis, and adds that they were “brothers from our team”, i.e. IS. (This echoes a statement from a Syrian IS official calling himself “Abu Musab”, who, on 7 January—after the Charlie Hebdo attack but before Coulibaly’s attacks—told Reuters: “These are our lions.”) In the video, Coulibaly goes on to say, “We did things a bit together and a bit apart”—that is, coordinated the attacks, but split into two teams—“so that it’d have more impact”.
The French investigation strongly points toward Coulibaly telling the truth: all of the evidence showing how the Charlie Hebdo attack was brought off—the weapons-suppliers in the network, the financial flows—“led up to Amedy Coulibaly”; none of it led to the Kouachis.
So, why did Chérif, when contacted by BFMTV, say: “I was sent … by Al-Qaeda of Yemen” (AQAP) and, “I went over there and it was Anwar al-Awlaki who financed me”? This was not completely outlandish: Chérif had been to Yemen, in 2011, and apparently received training and $20,000 from AQAP—though it was unclear what, if any, contact he had with the group after that.
It is possible that the Kouachis had defected to IS and chose to muddy the waters; the logic of this is not readily apparent.
It is possible that at least Chérif knew it was an IS-enabled operation but was telling the truth about the Kouachis’ allegiance to AQAP and was playing some complicated game to try to tamp down the murderous strife between the two groups that had taken hold in Syria a year earlier—to reunite IS and Al-Qaeda at least against the common Western enemy. In that case, this was simply a freak event where personal relationships overcame ideological schism. The problem with this, even if it is assumed that the Kouachis knew that Coulibaly was an IS agent and were okay with having their operation underwritten by a group that regards Al-Qaeda as heretical, is that Coulibaly was a true IS believer, and, to coin a phrase, IS does not share power.
On the basis of the known dynamics within the network—with Coulibaly in receipt of the money from IS and in control of the weapons flow due to his arms dealer contacts from his criminal days—it seems far more likely that Ayei is correct: Coulibaly was driving the plot and manipulating the Kouachis, neither of whom mentioned Coulibaly and may not have known where his allegiance lay.
The broader context points to IS, too: January 2015 is more than four years after Al-Qaeda’s last demonstrable foreign attack attempt,2 at a time when Al-Qaeda was attempting to use IS as a foil to rebrand as a more reasonable actor, focused on the protection of Muslims rather than random violence against Western civilians, and right as IS’s global attacks campaign was hitting its stride.
Post has been updated
REFERENCES
Aaron Zelin (2020), Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad, p. 229.
There is a claim AQAP was preparing an attack in the spring of 2012, but when examined it rather dissipates.