New York Times Special Report,
In the year after the United States’ invasion of Iraq, a 22-year-old pizza delivery man here couldn’t take it anymore. Sickened by images of American soldiers humiliating Muslims at the Abu Ghraib prison, he made plans to fight United States forces in Iraq. He studied a virtual AK-47 on a website. Then he took lessons from a man, using a hand-drawn picture of a gun.
It was an almost laughable attempt at jihad, and as the day of his departure approached, the delivery man, Chérif Kouachi, felt increasingly unsure of himself.
“Several times, I felt like pulling out,” he later told investigators. “I didn’t want to die there.”
A decade later, Chérif Kouachi, flanked by his older brother Saïd, no longer had any reservations, as the two black-clad jihadists, sheathed in body armor, gave a global audience a ruthless demonstration in terror.
Walking with military precision into the guarded Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, they killed 12 people in the name of Allah. Then in the hours before the brothers died in a gunfight with police, Chérif took a call from a reporter, to make sure the world knew they carried out the attack on behalf of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen.
Much remains unclear about the brothers’ lives. But thousands of pages of legal documents obtained by The New York Times, including minutes of interrogations, summaries of phone taps, intercepted jailhouse letters and a catalog of images and religious texts found on the laptops of Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly, an associate who would later synchronize his own terror attack with the Kouachi brothers, reveal an arc of radicalization that saw them become steadily more professional and more discreet.