End for the ‘Black Widow of Jihad’, Europe’s terrorist recruiter Osama bin Laden congratulated

Was called Malika El Aroud and died of cancer last Friday in a Brussels hospital at the age of 64.

Belgian-Moroccan, he arrived in 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”had the life of another girl from the immigrant community of Brussels until at the age of 17 she ran away from home and started a life on the street that led her to drugs and various love affairs until a suicide attempt.

Then, he later recounted, he heard a voice saying to him: Only the Quran can save you.

From there, and in the Brussels district of Molenbeek which would become famous in 2015 and 2016 because from there came several of the terrorists who attacked Brussels and Paris and dozens of young people who joined Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria and Iraq, yesWe moved in radical Islamist circles.

Malika Al-Aroud’s life changes when you meet a tunisianDahmane Abd El-Sattar, arrived in Brussels to study communication.

It was the 90s. At the end of the decade, her husband traveled to Afghanistan to join the Taliban and in 2001, shortly before the September bombings of that year in New York and Washington, traveled to meet him.

Her husband, at the time already a member of Al-Qaeda, was one of the two suicide bombers who, posing as journalists who were interviewing him, assassinated on September 9, two days before the attacks, Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, the only guerrilla who had resisted with weapons, in the northern region of Panjshir, the Taliban and Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda.

In a book published in 2004, she described her late suicidal husband as “a man ready to sacrifice his life to save oppressed innocents” and Massoud as “the devil”.

Her Belgian judicial journey began in 2003. She was acquitted after the judge told her “Her ideas are very extreme but I can’t judge her for that”.

During his trial, he claimed that the 2001 September 11 attacks were carried out by “Jews trying to divert the world’s attention from the destruction of Palestine and the Palestinians.” Had she been acquitted, her small network of jihadists in Brussels would have been convicted of “preparing violent actions”.

His role as one of the leading 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. They have been accused of launching a website that disseminate images of murders of abductees by terrorist groups.

He also posted information about how to make bombs and bombing claims. The two were sentenced to six months in prison, but while her husband served them, she he was paroled.

A link to the worst attacks​

Investigations by 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. He was also linked to the terrorist who attacked a truck in Nice in 2016 and to an attack committed in Cairo in 2009.

The judicial process ended in 2010, when the Belgian Justice sentenced her to eight years’ imprisonment for recruit fighters. Belgian media later reported that because of his activities he had received congratulations years earlier from Osama bin Laden himself.

During her stay in prison, her husband died in 2012 from a bullet launched by an American drone in an Afghanistan-Pakistan border area just as Washington tries to close the porous Pakistan-Afghan border as more jihadists arrive. 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, also in 2018, was deprived of Belgian citizenshipwhich he had obtained when he was of age and united with the Moroccan one.

Belgian authorities attempted to deport her to Morocco, from where she had arrived at the age of five, but Rabat never accepted.

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