WATCH: In 2014, Paris attacks mastermind praised killing of ‘infidels’

By Times of Israel

In videos, fugitive Abdelhamid Abaaoud is filmed saying ‘it’s nice to see’ non-Muslims’ blood spill, laughing as he drags bodies tied to a truck

 As more details emerge about the eight-man squad that perpetrated Friday’s deadly Paris attacks in which 129 people were killed, a series of videos have surfaced purporting to show the suspected mastermind behind the operation hailing the spilling of “infidel” blood and dragging mutilated bodies behind his truck while fighting in Syria.

In one of the clips, Belgian-raised Abdelhamid Abaaoud, whose nom de guerre is Abu Omar al-Belgiki, can be seen giving an impromptu monologue on waging jihad on non-Muslims, praising the act of killing enemies and seeing their blood spilled.

        

A child of Moroccan immigrants who grew up in the Belgian capital’s scruffy and multiethnic Molenbeek-Saint-Jean neighborhood, Abaaoud, who is in his late 20s, was identified by French authorities on Monday as the presumed mastermind of the attacks.

“There is no joy in spilling blood, but it’s nice to see from time to time,” he says in a March 2014 video made public by the Middle East Media Research Institute. In the clip, Abaaoud is seen holding a rifle under one arm, claiming he is in a trench trying to evade a sniper. Gunfire can be heard in the background.

In the video, Abaaoud also calls on followers to wage “sweet jihad” and leave their families and comforts behind to “elevate the word of Allah.”

He is said to be a key Islamic State recruiter of jihadists to Syria.

In another, more harrowing clip, Abaaoud can be seen pointing and laughing while bodies are tied to the back of his truck on their way to be taken to a mass grave.

“Before we towed jet skis, motorcycles, quad bikes, big trailers filled with gifts for vacation in Morocco. Now, thank God, following God’s path, we’re towing apostates, infidels who are fighting us,” he says.

According to AP, Abaaoud was once a happy-go-lucky student at one of Brussels’s most prestigious high schools, Saint-Pierre d’Uccle, but in time morphed into Belgium’s most notorious jihadi, a zealot so devoted to the cause of holy war that he recruited his 13-year-old brother to join him in Syria.

What’s more, one French official told The Associated Press, Abaaoud is believed to have links to earlier terror attacks that were thwarted: one against a Paris-bound high-speed train that was foiled by three young Americans in August, and the other against a church in the French capital’s suburbs.

“All my life, I have seen the blood of Muslims flow,” Abaaoud said in a video made public in 2014. “I pray that Allah will break the backs of those who oppose him, his soldiers and his admirers, and that he will exterminate them.”

This undated image taken from a jihadist website on Monday Nov. 16, 2015 shows Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of the Paris terror attacks on November 13, smiling before dragging mutilated bodies behind his truck in Syria. (Jihadist video via AP)

Belgian authorities suspect him of also helping to organize and finance a terror cell in the eastern city of Verviers that was broken up in an armed police raid on Jan. 15, in which two of his presumed accomplices were killed.

The following month, Abaaoud was quoted by the Islamic State group’s English-language magazine, Dabiq, as saying that he had secretly returned to Belgium to lead the terror cell and then escaped to Syria in the aftermath of the raid despite having his picture broadcast across the news.

“I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance!” Abaaoud boasted.