(CNN)Said and Cherif Kouachi, who are the leading suspects in Wednesday's attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, grew up in a world of poor job prospects, life in the French equivalent of the projects and prison time that is not untypical for the French "underclass," which is disproportionately Muslim.
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.
He planned to travel to Iraq via Syria. This appears to be quite significant as the pipeline of Western "foreign fighters" traveling to Syria and then to Iraq during this time period was dominated by "al Qaeda in Iraq," which was a precursor both of the Nusra Front, which is al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, and also of ISIS, which broke away from al Qaeda early last year.
He was sentenced to three years in prison in 2008 for recruiting fighters to join in the Iraq War alongside the notorious leader of the al Qaeda affiliate there, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, but didn't serve any time after the conviction; the judge ruled that his pretrial detention had been enough.
Nonetheless, Cherif's time in prison awaiting trial seems to have not only solidified his radicalization, but also connected him to people who were important in French militant circles While in pretrial detention, Cherif met Djamel Beghal, who was in prison for his role in an attempted attack against the U.S. Embassy in Paris in 2001.
Cherif and Beghal became friends and in 2010, when Beghal was released, he and Cherif allegedly planned the jail break of another radical Islamist who was serving a life sentence for his involvement in the bombing of the Musee d'Orsay train station in Paris in October 1995 that wounded 29 people.
But prosecutors couldn't prove the conspiracy, and Cherif was released.
