Western forces were trying to locate and kill the suspected mastermind of Friday’s terror attack in Paris, but couldn’t pinpoint his location in Syria in the weeks leading up to the attack.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud is a Belgian citizen who escaped to Syria earlier this year after authorities convicted him of recruiting jihadists and disrupted a plot he was suspected of planning to behead Belgian police officers. Western allies were tracking Abaaoud in Syria as part of a plan to root out and kill ISIS militants who recruit Westerners, and planned to kill him in an airstrike, but couldn’t locate his exact location, reported The Wall Street Journal.
Abaaoud grew up in Belgium, but traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State in 2013 and later returned to Europe without notice of the authorities. He is suspected of planning a plot to behead Belgian police officers that was foiled in January, and is believed to have escaped back to Syria that same month.
A Belgian court convicted him of recruiting jihadists for ISIS in July and sentenced him to 20 years in prison, and authorities have since been searching for him in Syria. Western officials told TheWSJ those looking for Abaaoud had no knowledge of the Paris terror plot, and it’s unclear whether killing Abaaoud in recent weeks would have prevented the attacks.
Abaaoud is also suspected of helping plan an attack on passengers taking a high-speed train to Paris earlier this year that was largely thwarted by three Americans on the train, and of helping plan a foiled attack on a church in a Paris suburb last April.
A French radio station reported he is “one of the most active ISIS executioners” in Syria He’s appeared in a video smiling while dragging a pile of bodies attached to his truck to a mass grave in Syria.
Authorities have conducted multiple raids on his neighborhood in Brussels since Friday, which has been linked to a disproportionate number of terror plots.
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