The director of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has issued a sharply worded editorial on the one-year anniversary of the attacks on its offices that left 12 people dead , calling out fanatics brutalized by the Quran who sought to silence them for daring to make light of religion.

"Never have we wanted so badly to bash the heads in of those who dreamed of our deaths," wrote Laurent Sourisseau, who goes by Riss.

Thursday marks one year since two al-Qaeda-linked Islamic militants, Cherif and Said Kouachi, stormed the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris before killing several more people at a kosher grocery store . The Kouachi brothers were later killed in a shootout with police.

Charlie Hebdo has a history of spurring controversy by drawing satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as Christian and Jewish religious figures such as the pope.

Backlash over the cartoons in the form of protests and even a firebomb in the office in 2011 required the paper to put in place more robust security measures for the staff. Stphane Charbonnier, who went by Charb, was even assigned his own security guard around the clock. He was killed in last year's attack.

"On January 7 2015, around 11:35am, something strange happened," Riss wrote. "It's something we had all thought might happen, but never something we actually prepared for."