He is not an ethnically European convert to Islam, as one French private intelligence newsletter had it, an assumption apparently based on the lightness of his complexion. Himich is Moroccan, having been born in Rabat in 1989, although it would be more accurate to describe him as a cultural Frenchman, as his kunya, or nom de guerre “Firansi” suggests. He spent the majority of his adolescence and education in Lunel, a southern French town of around 26,000 that has produced as many as two dozen youngish foreign fighters for the Syrian battlefield. Also, he does not appear to have run gyms or fitness centers; instead, he ran drugs. And, typically, before becoming a jihadi, he was a jailbird.

Source: The French Spymaster of ISIS – The Daily Beast – 10/24/2016 – by Michael Weiss.