On Friday, the two brothers were killed in a shootout with police, achieving their goal of a supposedly heroic “martyrdom.” Before they died, one of the brothers spoke on the phone to a journalist from the French news network BFM saying, “We are just telling you that we are the defenders of Prophet Mohammed. I was sent, me, Cherif Kouachi, by al Qaeda in Yemen. I went there and Sheikh Anwar Al-Awlaki financed my trip… before he was killed.”
Anwar al-Awlaki was a Yemeni American cleric born in New Mexico who spent much of his life in his native United States, but he left in 2002 when he became the subject of intense FBI scrutiny. He traveled first the United Kingdom and then to Yemen, where he joined al Qaeda, eventually rising to become the head of its operations to target the West.
Al-Awlaki was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in September 2011.
Cherif Kouachi, the younger of the brothers had dreams of being a successful rapper that fizzled and later worked in a series of menial jobs, including as a pizza delivery guy. He fell under the spell of a militant cleric in the 19th arrondissement, a gritty immigrant-dominated suburb of northeastern Paris that has little in common with the glamorous French capital city that is known to tourists.
He was arrested by French authorities in 2005 when he was about to leave to fight in Iraq.
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