Her name was
Malika El-Aroud
and she died of cancer last Friday in a Brussels hospital at the age of 64.
Belgian-Moroccan, he came to Brussels at the age of 5 at the hands of his immigrant parents.
What would later be known as
"Mama Jihad" or "Black Widow of Jihad"
, lived the life of another girl from the immigrant community of Brussels until she ran away from home at the age of 17 and began a street life that led her to for drugs and various love affairs until
a suicide attempt.
Then, he later recounted, he heard a voice telling him:
Only the Koran can save you
.
From there, and in the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, which would become famous in 2015 and 2016 because several of the terrorists who attacked Brussels and Paris and dozens of young people who joined Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria came from it. and Iraq,
it was moving in radical Islamist circles.
Malika El-Aroud before the court in Brussels.
The woman moved among radical Islamist circles.
Photo: BAS BOGAERTS / AFP
Malika Al-Aroud's life changes
when she meets a Tunisian
, Dahmane Abd El-Sattar, who has come to Brussels to study communication.
It was the 1990s. At the end of the decade,
her husband traveled to Afghanistan
to join the Taliban and in 2001, shortly before the attacks in September of that year in New York and Washington, she traveled to meet him.
Her husband, already a member of Al-Qaeda at the time, was one of the two suicide bombers who, posing as journalists who were interviewing him, assassinated Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud on September 9, two days before the attacks
. ,
the only guerrilla fighter who had resisted with arms, in the northern region of Panshir, the Taliban and Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda.
In a book published in 2004, she described her suicidal late husband as “
a man ready to sacrifice his life
to save innocent oppressed” and Massoud as “the devil”.
Her Belgian judicial journey began in 2003. She was acquitted after the judge told her that
"her ideas are very extremist but I cannot judge her for that
. "
During the trial, he said that the 9/11 attacks in 2001 had been carried out by "Jews who sought to divert the world's attention from destroying Palestine and the Palestinians."
If she was acquitted, her small network of jihadists in Brussels was convicted of "preparing violent actions."
Malika El-Aroud's Belgian judicial journey began in 2003. Photo: BAS BOGAERTS / AFP
His role as one of the most important figures of jihadism in Europe only grew.
In 2005 she was arrested in Switzerland, where she lived with her second husband, Moez Garsallaoui, another budding jihadist.
She accused them of launching a website that
spread images of murders of hostages
by terrorist groups.
It also published information on
how to make bombs and claims of attacks
.
The two were sentenced to six months in prison, but while her husband served them, she
was released on parole.
A link to the worst
attacks
Investigations by the Belgian Justice concluded that "The Black Widow of Jihad" had been in contact with some of the jihadists who attacked Madrid in March 2004.
Malika Al-Aroud
justified terrorist violence
.
She was also linked to the terrorist who attacked a truck in Nice in 2016 and to an attack in Cairo in 2009.
The truck used in the attack in Nice in 2016. Photo: archive
The judicial trip ends in 2010, when the Belgian Justice sentences her to eight years in prison for
recruiting combatants.
The Belgian media then recounted that she had been congratulated years ago by Osama bin Laden himself
for her activities .
During her stay in prison, her husband died in 2012, hit by a projectile
launched by an American drone
in a border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan just as Washington tries to close the porous Pakistani-Afghan border to the arrival of more jihadists.
Her husband had been the one who prepared the jihadists who attacked Toulouse in March 2012.
Malika El-Aroud was released from prison after serving her sentence and shortly after, still in 2018,
she was deprived of her Belgian nationality
, which she had obtained when she came of age and combined with Moroccan.
The Belgian authorities tried to deport her to Morocco, where she had come from when she was five years old,
but Rabat never accepted
.
Brussels, special for Clarín
ap
look too
The day paradise blew up: 20 years after the Bali attacks
Those accused of the 2016 attack in Nice are sentenced to up to 18 years in prison
