On Friday, the world got its first look at Tashfeen Malik who, along with her husband Syed Rizwan Farook, stormed a San Bernardino county employee holiday party killing 14 and wounding 21.
Here is her Pakistan ID card:
Both suspects were killed in a subsequent shootout with police and in the wake of the tragedy, the FBI revealed that Malik pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Bakr al-Baghdadi on Facebook while the attack was in progress.
We documented what’s known about Malik’s past on Saturday. Here’s a brief recap [6]:
As Reuters reports, Malik “was from Karor Lal Esan, a city on the west coast of the Indus River in southern Punjab province.” She had been living in Saudi Arabia with her father for 25 years. Pakistani officials note that “the area in Punjab where she spent her early years and later went to university is a 'recruitment ground' and stronghold of Islamist groups with ties to al Qaeda.”
The LA Times calls Malik's family "educated [and] politically influential." "Residents said the Aulakh family is known to have connections to militant Islam," the paper continues before citing a local as saying that "the family has some extremist credentials," whatever that means.
In any event, when her father moved to Saudi Arabia, “he changed a lot,” Malik's uncle, Javed Rabbani, says. "When relatives visited him, they would come back and tell us how conservative and hardline he had become.” Reuters goes on to say that the Saudi government had no information linking her to terrorist organizations.
Farook brought Malik back to the US after marrying her in Saudi Arabia. On Monday, ABC released a picture taken as the couple moved through customs at Chicago O’Hare on July 27, 2014. Here's the image:
While Malik looks similar to the other images that have made the rounds, Farook's appearance differs rather noticeably from the DMV picture circulated last week.
While we were the first to mock [7] co-workers' contention that Farook's radicalization could be confirmed by the size of his beard, we would note that although you cannot judge a book by its cover, it does indeed appear as though some manner of transformation might have taken place in or around Farook's two visits to Saudi Arabia. Indeed, US authorities now say that "initial evidence gathered by counterterrorism investigators suggests Ms. Malik may have had a stronger bond than her husband to jihadist ideology," WSJ reports [8].
It's "a very real possibility" the attack was instigated by Malik, unnamed officials say, adding the Farook was just a man "looking for answers."
Maybe. Or maybe it's just more convenient to blame the "radical" Saudi/Pakistani wife than it is to admit that a Chicago-born public health inspector was so disillusioned with his life in America that he turned to radical Islam before embarking on a murderous rampage.
