If you want a deeper understanding of the Paris attacks, read this.
It's an in-depth and well researched piece on Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers. It's long, so it's impossible to give an idea of the article through excerpts. Nevertheless....
Along the pathways of Paris’s picturesque Buttes-Chaumont park, with its hills, lake and faux Roman temple, Chérif Kouachi, a local pizza deliveryman, would regularly go jogging. Past the waffle stands, pavilion restaurant, picnickers and children’s play areas, there are always runners working up a sweat up on the park’s steep inclines. But Kouachi and his small group of jogging mates had a particular purpose a criminal court would later hear: they were keeping fit for foreign jihad.
The group of Parisian friends were all in their early 20s; many had met at a local middle school, most had poor school records and chaotic family lives. They came from deprived corners of the surrounding 19th arrondissement in north-eastern Paris, a mix of gentrified apartment buildings, working-class streets and a patchwork of high-rises troubled by gang turf-wars.
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Coulibaly, known as “Doly”, was born in France to parents from Mali. He was the only boy, with nine sisters, and grew up on a notorious housing estate, La Grande-Borne, in Grigny, south of Paris. “One of the most difficult estates in France,” said Malek Boutih, a former anti-racism campaigner who is now Socialist MP for the area.
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In prison together, Kouachi and Coulibaly found not only friendship but a mentor who radicalised them, Djamel Beghal . The portly Beghal, serving a 10-year sentence for a plot to bomb the US embassy in Paris, had once been a regular worshipper at Finsbury Park mosque in London and a disciple of the radical preachers Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada. He came to be seen by UK and French intelligence as one of al-Qaida’s leading recruiters in Europe.
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/12/-sp-charlie-hebdo-attackers-kids-france-radicalised-paris
