For sole survivor of Paris terror cell, the road to Islamic State began with a life of crime

He is the silent survivor of the 10-man Islamic State cell that terrorised Paris in November 2015, refusing all pleas to shed light on the attack that killed 130 people in the French capital or the one in Belgium four days after his arrest.

After spending nearly three years jailed in isolation, Salah Abdeslam is set to go on trial Monday in his hometown of Brussels for his role in a shoot-out with police during which he fled. The man who covered his getaway with a spray of automatic gunfire died. Abdeslam’s escape was short-lived – he was captured on March 18, 2016, in the same neighbourhood where he and many of his Islamic State fighter colleagues grew up.

Four days later, Islamic State

suicide attackers struck again, this time at the Brussels airport and subway. In all, that sprawling network of IS fighters killed 162 people in the two European capitals. Most of the extremists were French speakers, raised in one of the cities they struck. The plot’s execution depended upon Islamic State’s success in wedding crime and religion.

Abdeslam, who along with his brother was suspected of dealing drugs from the bar they ran, is the starkest example of that convergence. But in Paris, the trial of three men accused of giving safe haven to the attackers also provides a revealing look at the intersection that made possible two of the deadliest terror attacks in Europe since World War II.

The operational commander of the cell was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a petty criminal who used his home neighbourhood of Molenbeek in Brussels as a fertile recruiting ground for IS. Abaaoud even recruited his 14-year-old brother.

who followed him into IS were small-time criminals themselves, part of the extremist organisation’s deliberate attempt to make use of “skills” that include accessing black market weapons, forging documents and handling covert logistics.