Their faces became familiar to us this week, through images recorded on Islamic State videos, through police mugshots and through Facebook pages. But they provide no clues about why five Frenchmen and a Belgian of north African Arab origin, aged between 21 and 31, set out to slaughter as many “infidels” as possible on the night of Friday, November 13th. There is Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the 28-year-old jolly jihadist with a toothy grin and a taste for self-promotion. He died in a crumbling apartment building in Saint-Denis early on Wednesday, blown apart by police grenades or perhaps a suicide belt. Could this goofy-looking young man really be “the face of terror,” as Libération newspaper called...
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