The Merah affair put a dramatic end to the sixteen-year illusion that France was immune to jihadist terrorism on its own soil—in contrast to Spain or Great Britain, which had been the target of major attacks in 2004 and 2005. On March 19, 2012, a young Franco-Algerian man by the name of Mohamed Merah murdered three Jewish children and a teacher in cold blood at a Hebrew school in Toulouse. This occurred exactly fifty years after the Évian Accords—the ceasefire that ended the Algerian War—went into effect and also at the beginning of the presidential campaign that François Hollande won with the help of massive support from the Muslim electorate. In the course of the preceding week, this same killer had attacked four French soldiers, murdering three of them and seriously wounding the fourth. Three of the soldiers were of North African origin, while the other was from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.
These acts not only were atrocious (Merah took pleasure in the massacre of little children, which he filmed using his GoPro) but also took on an exceptional symbolic dimension by injecting jihadist violence into the country’s most important political event—the presidential election. Committed by someone who had grown up in the banlieues, these murders also called into question the French ideology of integration as the national secular and republican grand narrative, and they rewrote in blood a somber story of a country that had yet to overcome its colonial past.
With this affair, France entered straight into the third wave of jihadism advocated by the aforementioned Syrian jihadist thinker Abu Musab al-Suri in his Global Islamic Resistance Call. The murders followed to the letter the instructions recommended by this book, which could be downloaded from the Internet: the killer chose his targets in his nearby environment and selected them because they were Jewish or “apostates”—the targeted soldier from Guadeloupe may have been the victim of a “racial profiling” that saw him as a lapsed African Muslim whose blood was therefore permissible to shed. A petty thief and juvenile delinquent of Algerian descent, Merah was radicalized by his time in prison, his trips to the lands of jihad, and propaganda videos posted on YouTube or shared on social media, as well as the regional Salafist milieu that he dealt with and of which his brother Abdelkader and his sister So’ad were prominent members.
But the terrifying carnage in Montauban and Toulouse did not testify solely to the efficacy of the jihad model that al-Suri had conceived. It also shed light in a sudden and brutal way on the existence and identity of French jihadists capable not only of appropriating ideas originally expressed by a Syrian-Spanish ideologue and then made commonplace via Islamist social media but also of translating such ideas into action. These jihadists were members of the generation born in the last three decades of the twentieth century and dubbed Generation Y by sociologists—referring, perhaps, to the wire of the headsets dangling from their ears to their navels, making a kind of Y and closely connecting them to the digital world like a postmodern umbilical cord that could no longer be cut. Bottle-fed on video games, this generation has blurred the line between the virtual and the real worlds, passing from one to the other with an ease that disarms its parents, members of a post–World War II Generation X who were educated and socialized before the digital era. In the French banlieues, this Generation Y came into the world in the wake of the political failure of the 1983 March of the Beurs. It reached adulthood, disillusioned, around 2005, the year of the riots and of the online publication of al-Suri’s Call.
Merah’s killing spree was the first of a series that was raised to new heights by the massacres committed in January 2015 at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, in November 2015 at the Bataclan nightclub, and on Bastille Day 2016 in Nice. That first incident thrust France into a global web of jihadism in which social dereliction, the colonial past, political disillusionment, and Islamist provocation were interwoven. Suddenly, the taboo on murder for a political/religious cause was swept away by a new, radical Salafist doctrine that redefined the boundary lines between good and evil by making it permissible to kill “infidels” on French soil. Jihadist violence, which people had become accustomed to seeing happen only on their television screens, had now penetrated the very heart of everyday French life and depended on modalities that remained incomprehensible for most people.
In the history of Islam in France as it has unfolded since the 1970s, the young people who personify the third stage of worldwide jihadism also belong to the third generation of France Muslims, who (with the exception of converts) are the children of postcolonial immigrants. Clearly, the radicalized activists in this cohort who have committed criminal acts represent only a tiny minority, but they constitute the avant-garde of a larger Salafist trend whose rapid expansion on French territory characterized the decade between 2005 and 2015. The all-encompassing, uncompromising Islam of this new generation scarcely existed prior to 2005, when community leadership was in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood Filial l’Union des organisations islamiques de France (UOIF).
The irruption of Salafism corresponded to a complete disavowal of the values and mores of French society. In principle, this rejectionism should lead this third generation of believers to practice hegira, or emigration, to majority Muslim countries in order to live a “completely Islamic” life. In the absence of the ability, or perhaps desire, to take this logical step, the rejectionist orientation leads these young people to construct enclosed enclaves on French territory that mimic, as much as possible, the experience of living as a Muslim in a majority Muslim country.
The movement expanded after the 2005 riots, at a time when a majority of young French people who were Muslims by heritage or culture assumed the responsibilities of their recently acquired citizenship by getting involved in the democratic electoral process. Their involvement was, however, abhorred by the followers of “total Islam,” who considered the republican notion of the sovereignty of the people an idol to be overthrown. Sovereignty, they maintained, was Allah’s alone, and the only legitimate law was sharia, drawn from the commandments contained in the holy scriptures of the Quran and the hadiths (the sayings of the Prophet). But paradoxically, it was as French—they were the first generation primarily composed of French citizens—that these Salafists disavowed French republican values and practices in order to espouse a “total,” all-encompassing version of Islam, which they viewed as their sole identity.
This paradox was exacerbated by the singular coincidence of the massacres in Toulouse and Montauban, perpetrated by Mohamed Merah in the name of this total Islam, with the 2012 political campaigns—first for the presidency and then for the French parliament. For the first time, a “Muslim” vote was forcefully expressed; an overwhelming majority of French citizens defining themselves as such voted for the Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande and then for the parties of the left in the parliamentary elections, as we have seen in the preceding chapter. Even if, due to the constraints of French law, it is impossible to quantify the extent of Muslim support for the left in these elections, it is clear that in a close electoral race—Hollande ultimately won by only 1.13 million votes—the left owed a good part of its success in these elections to the massive mobilization of these voters.
Thus even as the first jihadist massacre of the twenty-first century in France took place, a significant and effective Muslim voting bloc came into being for the first time in the course of two major French elections. Moreover, this vote seems to have been determined for the most part by standard social and economic concerns such as are typically part of any election cycle. These two concomitant phenomena—Muslims’ first large-scale participation in elections and the irruption of jihadism—were situated at opposite ends of the political spectrum shared by these descendants of postcolonial immigration.
Mohamed Merah and those who identified with him—the thousands who “liked” the Facebook posts and pages dedicated to him—tried to ravage the country where they were born by implementing the jihadist strategy of civil war whose battle plan al-Suri had drawn up and whose stages the Franco-Tunisian jihadist Boubaker al-Hakim outlined in his interview in Dabiq, ISIS’s online magazine, in March 2015. And yet the vast majority of French Muslims wanted, by contrast, to participate completely in the political life of their country by taking up the duties of their newly acquired French citizenship.
The antinomy can be explained in part by the third coincidence that occurred during this tragic period: Merah’s shooting spree at the Jewish school occurred on the fiftieth anniversary of the bilateral proclamation of the ceasefire that put an end to the Algerian War, on March 19, 1962. This emblematic date has provided more than a thousand street names in French communes, testifying to the importance in the collective consciousness of the day when conscripts returned home after a brutal war. Merah desacralized that day on the calendar by relaunching, as a jihadist, war against France. The French far right, for its part, mirrored him by desacralizing it in its own way, attempting to expel the date from republican memory because it considered the 1962 French withdrawal a national shame. Thus in March 2015, the “19 of March 1962” Street in Beziers was given a new name by the mayor, Robert Ménard, a pied noir1 who has been all over the political spectrum but who now supports the National Front. The street was rebaptized to honor Commander Hélie Denoix de Saint Marc, a participant in a putsch in Algiers in April 1961 and a supporter of French Algeria. As the mayor of the fourth-poorest city in continental France, where much of the housing in neglected neighborhoods is occupied by destitute immigrant groups and Roma people (“Gypsies”) and where, according to his controversial remarks, “64.9 percent of schoolchildren are Muslims,” Ménard sought by this symbolic gesture to efface the commemoration of what he and his political allies saw as a capitulation. Similarly, in Beaucaire, in November 2005, the FN mayor, Julien Sanchez, renamed a street “rue du 5-juillet-1962-Massacre of Oran” (July 5 Street—Massacre of Oran). On this emblematic date, several hundred French Algerians were massacred in that Algerian city, an event that precipitated a mass exodus of pieds-noirs to the France.
Merah, too, sought to metaphorically violate the fifty-year-old ceasefire that had ended the war in Algeria, like Khaled Kelkal, the Franco-Algerian perpetrator of the 1995 terror bombings in France. Merah was born into a family in which the hatred of France was extreme: when he took up arms, his acquaintances crowed that he would “bring France to its knees,” and his sister So’ad declared that she was “proud, proud, proud” of her younger brother’s acts. In this way he combined the undying anti-French bitterness of his milieu with al-Suri’s new injunction to massacre apostates wearing the infidel’s military uniforms. Merah was careful to confirm that his victim, a paratrooper of Moroccan origin named Imad ibn Ziaten, was in fact a soldier. Because Merah recorded the killing so that he could pass on images to Al-Jazeera and post them on social media sites, we know that while executing Ibn Ziaten, Merah declared, “That’s Islam, my brother: you kill my brothers, I kill you!” The expression “my brother” testifies here to the intra-Islamic identification. It translates the dialectal Arabic expression khouya, which North Africans use to address each other and from which the French slang term crouille is derived.
However, nothing indicates that this impudent killer—in Arabic, merah means “cheeky, insolent, impudent, jovial”—deliberately committed the massacre in Toulouse on that particular day in March in order to bring to mind the fiftieth anniversary of the Évian Accords. On the contrary, his mediocre education suggests that he may not have known the precise chronology of the Algerian War. But whatever his perception of the real meaning of this date may have been, the symbolic power of the anniversary transcends the crime itself. It explains the link between the new strategy laid out by al-Suri’s Call and French Salafism, which had strong ties to Algerian culture and was characterized by a visceral resentment against the former colonial power, particularly in the jihadist wing of the movement. It is the catalytic action of al-Suri’s Call that explains why France, despite sixteen years of peace, gave birth to people like Merah, Nemmouche, and Kouachi, all of whom were Franco-Algerians or Algerians, and then to the largest European contingent of jihadists to have joined ISIS in Syria.
These events can be traced back to the 1990s, when two phenomena emerged simultaneously: the Algerian civil war, which brought armed Salafism to France, and the arrival in France of preachers of Saudi origin, which advocated a radical break with the values of infidel French society, though without violence. Al-Suri knew Algerian jihadist Salafism well; as a former fighter in Afghanistan, he had lent legitimacy to the Algerian GIA by editing its international bulletin, Al-Ansar. As Khaled Kelkal was in a sense the manager of Algerian Islamism north of the Mediterranean, the Algerian Islamists ceased to engage in actual terrorism in France after his death in 1995. However, this milieu continued to expand there through the illegal immigration of jihadists following the Algerian army’s victory over the insurrection in Algiers and the eradication of resistance groups from most regions in the autumn of 1997.
These radical Islamist networks thus remained very much alive in France. As we have already seen, examples of this include Djamel Beghal and his accomplices’ plot to blow up the American embassy in Paris, as well as the Buttes-Chaumont jihadist network in the mid-1990s. Chérif Kouachi’s mentor, Farid Benyettou, who had been initiated into this doctrine by his brother-in-law Youssef Zemmouri, a former member of the Algerian GSPC, preached to young Parisians to persuade them to go to Iraq to join the local branch of al-Qaeda, which was then led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and from which ISIS would be born.
Unlike the Salafist movement that arose in Algeria in the early 1990s and quickly became politicized and militarized, the movement that arose in France at the same time was for the most part politically apathetic. The majority of its followers considered elections haram and refused to mobilize against the established powers, preferring to focus on proselytizing instead. The first preachers arrived at the beginning of the decade, at the time when their Saudi mentors needed to win back the hearts of Sunni Muslims throughout the world, especially immigrants in Europe, who enthusiastically supported Saddam Hussein during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and condemned the pro-American oil monarchies on the gulf. The strictly depoliticized and ostensibly pietist Islam of these Salafists was expressed by absolute obedience to the Grand Wahhabi Ulemas that support the Riyadh regime, which lavishly remunerateds them in return.
It was in Roubaix and on the outskirts of Lyon, which were bastions of the Algerian colony in France, that the movement took off. Those who showed inclinations toward this doctrine gradually left to be trained in the Salafist seminaries in Egypt or Yemen. Saudi Arabia granted only a few of these marginalized youths visas allowing them to study in its own universities. The kingdom’s cautiousness increased after September 11 and then again after the attacks al-Qaeda carried out in the Arabian Peninsula between 2003 and 2006.
The authorities in Riyadh distrusted these fragile individuals who had been touched by grace but who were capable of suddenly turning against the monarchy and biting the hand that fed them by slipping into violence. However, they were willing to use these French Salafists to relay their message abroad, as part of their bid for hegemony over all of Sunni Islam. Thus the Saudi authorities repeatedly granted temporary visas for the pilgrimage season, especially since French Muslims did not fill the generous quota allocated to the Republic by Saudi authorities. This rite, one of the “pillars of Islam,” which a pious believer must carry out at least once during his lifetime, was quickly transformed by French Salafists into an exercise in virtuousness that led their followers to go to Mecca each year, distinguishing themselves from co-religionists whom they considered worldly or too lukewarm in their faith. The multiplicity of meetings during the hajj, the permanent emulation, and the exemplarity helped structure a milieu that was to grow in numbers and in self-affirmation during the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Salafism, contrasting its alternative lifestyle with generalized “misbelief,” explicitly situates itself in the most rigorous tradition of Sunni Islam, which reserves salvation for such an elect alone. But paradoxically, Salafism found a cultural opportunity that allowed it to flourish in the soil of a de-Christianized and post-leftist Europe. Sometimes it is also able to substitute for the secular models of utopian counter-societies incarnated by the “radiant ideal” of Communism and then by the nebulous “alternative” issuing from May 1968, from Larzac, or even from hippie communes or religious sects that made headlines at the end of the last century, from Mandarom to the Order of the Solar Temple,2 before falling into oblivion. As for the jihadists, the terrorists of the French Action directe group,3 the Italian Red Brigades, and the German Red Army Faction—movements that fell into abeyance around the year 2000—were their avowed forerunners on the Old Continent.
Thus in the Midi-Pyrénées region in the southwest of France, a neorural commune combining a return to the land and a return to religion, pigeon raising, and the indoctrination of followers served as the surprising soil that nourished Mohamed Merah.
ARTIGAT: FROM HASHISH TO SHARIA
In 1983, a Syrian Islamist preacher named Abdulillah al-Dandachi was granted French citizenship under the strangely Christian name of Olivier Corel. He was born in 1946 and came to France in 1973 to pursue a degree in pharmacy but was unsuccessful and made a living working in various trades. He came from the Sunni town of Tell Kalakh, which straddles the road between Homs and Tartous at the foot of the Krak des Chevaliers, a Crusader castle in Syria that blocks communications between the Alawite coastal area and Damascus—and that would be one of the first localities to take up arms against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in May 2011 and thus one of the first to be subjected to the murderous bombardments of his air force.
Sheik Corel was a member of the Association des étudiants islamiques en France (AEIF, or Association of Islamic Students in France), the first group in modern French history that brought together students with Islamist leanings. It was created in 1963 under the aegis of Professor Muhammad Hamidullah, the author of the very literal French translation of the Quran preferred by Salafists of all persuasions. The Toulouse branch of the AEIF, along with those in Paris and Strasbourg, was the most active, and Corel taught “total” Islam in the banlieues there. He acquired a certain aura among young French “natives,” some of whom combined a taste for post-1968 utopias with a taste for hashish.
Sojourns in Morocco, particularly in regions where the cultivation and consumption of hashish were associated with the practice of popular religion and where trading the substance was profitable, favored some people’s conversion to a faith that facilitated these transactions. But the same people, who later adopted Salafism and became followers of Abdulillah/Olivier Corel, rejected their earlier deviance with horror. Like the Prophet, who was himself a merchant, and following the ethos of Western alternative cultures that advocated a rejection of capitalism and a return to the land, the families of converts who followed Corel engaged in petty trade, making and selling pottery in southern France. In the summer, they supplied the bourgeois bohemian and the vacation home market, but as Salafism required, they declined to offer customers representations of animals, humans, or even garden gnomes that might be seen as idolatrous.
Savings made it possible to travel during the winter. Sojourns in Afghanistan to carry out “humanitarian and religious missions” gradually replaced tours in Morocco, especially among some of the strictest Islamist groups. At the beginning of the 1990s, as both their business and their flock expanded, several of these families bought a group of ruined farms in the hamlet of Les Lanes.
These families settled in the foothills near the village of Artigat (population five hundred) in the département of Ariège, less than an hour’s drive from Toulouse. Their land was poor, supporting only chestnut forests and small flocks of sheep. It had been deserted during the rural exodus of the 1970s, but in the past, these foothills had sheltered other dissidents, such as the Protestant philosopher Pierre Bayle, born in 1647 just a stone’s throw away, in the town of Le Carla. The nearby city of Albi had been home to a group of Catharist heretics, whose dream of a new society that would break with the values of the Catholic Church may remind us of the Salafists’ break with contemporary French society; notably, both sects divided humanity into two groups: believers and infidels, the instruments of Satan, who were to be eliminated.
The village in which these families settled, Artigat, was briefly famous as the site of the Martin Guerre affair. This story of sixteenth-century identity theft was popularized by Daniel Vigne’s film The Return of Martin Guerre, with Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye, made in 1982, just at the time when Abdulillah/Olivier Corel was preaching Salafism in the housing projects of the Toulouse banlieues, where he was known as “the white sheikh” because of his light skin and his flowing silvery hair.
Abdulillah/Corel and his disciples bought sixty-two hectares (153 acres) of land and restored or built houses, creating a neorural community where women wore the facial veil, or niqab, and children were brought up with the teachings of sharia far from the infidels’ secular public schools. In this way, after four centuries of obscurity, Artigat recovered a notoriety that was paradoxical but that still reeked of brimstone. This rustic Salafist commune became the little Mecca of southwest France, to which the faithful traveled not only from elsewhere in the region but also from the Paris banlieues—notably Les Mureaux and Mantes in the Seine valley, which were famous for their housing projects riots and for the mosques that were built there during the 1980s. Summer camps were organized in Artigat, where young people from the banlieues learned about the “total” Islam from a charismatic sheikh who expressed himself in an oriental Arabic that fascinated converts and North Africans who did not know the language well.
Among those who went to Artigat during these years we find the crème de la crème of radical Islam from all over the Midi-Pyrénées region. In addition to the Merahs and Sabri Essid, Mohamed Merah’s Franco-Tunisian brother-in-law, the brothers Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain were there. In 2001 these two converts from Réunion, a French possession in the Indian Ocean, tried to take control of the Bellefontaine mosque in Toulouse, the main place of worship frequented by young people from the neighborhood of Mirail. In April 2015, the elder Clain, then living in Syria, was suspected of having sponsored the attack on a church in Villejuif for which Sid Ahmed Ghlam was arrested in Paris and later indicted. And on November 14, 2015, Fabien released a recording in which he read a statement taking responsibility for the massacres the day before in Paris and in Saint-Denis, while his younger brother sang the anashid—chants performed a cappella by men, the only ones permitted by strict interpretations of Islam—that preceded and followed the message.
Another person who spent time in Artigat was Thomas Barnouin from Albi, the son of teachers, who had been a Jehovah’s Witness before discovering Islam in 1999. In 2001 he briefly attended the UOIF’s training school for imams in Saint-Léger-de-Fougeret, in the département of Nièvre, but he was expelled from this institute, which leaned heavily toward the Muslim Brotherhood, a few days after classes began. Then he studied at the University of Medina in Saudi Arabia, for which French citizens could obtain study visas only if they had a strong local recommendation. This gave him not only the nom de guerre Omar al-Madani (“from Medina”) but also a measure of prestige among apprentice jihadists in Albi’s housing projects. In 2006, he left for Syria, where he rejoined Sabri Essid before they went on to fight in Iraq.
Barnouin and Essid were both arrested by the Syrian secret services in September of the same year. They were caught with weapons in an al-Qaeda hideout and were extradited in February 2007—at a time when the relations between Bashar al-Assad and the French minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, were very good. Indicted in 2009 along with other members of the “Artigat network” for “conspiracy to engage in terrorist activity,” Barnouin was sentenced to four years in prison. He served his time and then, after a brief return to Albi—where he preached haloed with his twofold glory as a victim of the infidels and a scholar from Medina—he returned to Syria to take part in the jihad. He was now one of the main francophone religious figures affiliated with ISIS, and his “lessons” could be found online. In them he showed a perfect mastery of Arabic and of the radical Salafist corpus, as well as of the conflicts between rival groups on the Syrian-Iraqi battlefield. In particular, he used the holy scriptures of Islam, cited in the original and then precisely translated in excellent French, to justify the massacre of infidels and apostates, the seizure of their goods, and the enslavement of their women.
Another figure in this picture is Imad Djebali, one of Merah’s childhood friends, who was for a time described by legal chroniclers as the head of the “Artigat network.” In 2009, he, too, was convicted for his involvement in this affair. After his release from prison, he left for Syria in spring 2014 along with several men from Toulouse, including acquaintances of Merah’s, and then made a surprising return to France in September of the same year. He had gone back to the battlefield for several months in the company of Abdelouahed Baghdali, So’ad Merah’s second husband, and another convert, Gaël Maurize from Albi. The trio, even though they were well known to the police, landed in Marseille while the police were waiting for them at Orly airport near Paris. Subsequently they turned themselves in at the gendarmerie in Le Caylar, in the neighboring département of Hérault. Their lawyers told the press that they were returning to what they had once considered the cradle of depravity, having “seen the horror” where they had expected to find paradise.
Due to the arrests of members of the Artigat network in early 2007, the “white sheikh” was brought in for the first time by the police. Nothing concrete was proved against him, and he was allowed to return to Artigat, where he devoted his time to various agricultural projects. He dissociated himself from the affair, but from that time on, he refused to make any public statements—that is, until he had to respond to inquiries from the press after the attacks of November 13, 2015, when the voice of his former disciple Fabien Clain appeared in ISIS’s video claiming responsibility for the attacks. Several months earlier, he had politely declined to be interviewed by the author of this book, on the grounds that he had to take his mare to be bred on the day originally set for the meeting. He said that he preferred to continue our telephone conversation in French—which he pronounces with a strong southwest accent—rather than in the Syrian dialect: “It has been such a long time, I’ve forgotten.”
Around 2005, the original community was disbanded amid general acrimony, riven by internal crises over obscure issues in which financial and ideological stakes seem to have been closely interwoven. Around the small farm where the sheikh still resides, some of the buildings where the young people of Les Mureaux had prayed together have been taken over by brambles and vines. Thanks to skillful and discreet real estate agents, a few Salafists have managed to sell their former homes (which women left only when wearing the niqab) to English people who might have been nostalgic for Guyenne or to Dutch people who wanted more space. Today, these homes are mere vacation cabins that reek of stale beer. The stream of followers coming to stay with the master has dried up, but the patriarch is still there, pushing his wheelbarrow, wearing his plastic boots, and smiling under his long white beard, just as he can be seen on Google Images.
At that time, the network in Ariège operated in parallel with the Buttes-Chaumont network in Paris, from which the Kouachi brothers emerged. But unlike the impulsive young Paris emir Farid Benyettou, whom a court had found guilty of explicitly preaching jihad to his flock, his elder, forty years older, was well acquainted with hiyal, the sophistry of traditional Muslim scholarly circles. His case was once again dismissed.
As for Sabri Essid, he found time, between trips to Artigat, jail terms, and terrorist exploits, to visit Mohamed Merah in prison and to put him on the straight and narrow path of jihad. His influence over Merah was comparable to Djamel Beghal’s influence over Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly in the Fleury-Mérogis prison. In both cases, an experienced mentor succeeded in transforming vaguely Islamist boys from the banlieues into jihadist killers on French soil, following to the letter the modus operandi recommended by Abu Musab al-Suri.
The network provided the tazkiyya (recommendations) that the children of immigrants and other converts in Midi-Pyrénées needed to register in Middle Eastern religious training programs, despite their rudimentary knowledge of Arabic. Travels to the area, meant to toughen them up, were also crucial for the formation of connections between these “brothers.” Between 2006 and 2011, Abdelkader and So’ad, Mohamed’s elder brother and sister, intermittently stayed at the Egyptian Salafist madrassa for francophones, al-Fagr (“dawn,” the hour when the first daily prayer is said), in the Cairo suburb of Nasr City. The future killer in Toulouse and Montauban visited them there in October 2010 during one of his journeys to be trained in jihad.
In addition to his role as a spiritual advisor, Abdulillah/Olivier Corel supervised the apprentice jihadists’ private lives. He blessed the second marriage of the Merahs’ mother—separated from her husband since he had been imprisoned in France for drug trafficking and then had been deported to Algeria—to the father of Sabri Essid, Mohamed’s mentor. In December 2011, three months before the bloodbaths in Montauban and Toulouse, Corel also married Mohamed to a young woman he was to repudiate only two weeks after the nikah (the consummation of the marriage).
For all these reasons, Mohamed Merah can hardly be considered a “lone wolf.” No matter what causal chain led to the massacres in March 2012, he was socialized in a milieu from which a number of key figures in French jihadism emerged. Between April and December 2010, he traveled—with the help of financing whose origin is still unknown but that greatly surpassed his official income, which consisted primarily of welfare payments and government subsidies—first to Algeria, where he sought in vain to meet underground jihadists in Kabylia, and then to the Middle East.
He used his Algerian and French passports to make a surprising journey that took him across the Syrian, Turkish, Lebanese, Jordanian, Egyptian, and even Israeli borders before he returned to Europe and then left again for Tajikistan and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, he was intercepted by the American military, who suspected that he was a terrorist and put his name on the No-Fly List for passengers to the United States. While he was there, he contacted Islamist milieus and visited tourist sites, where he posed for selfies—in order, he said, to fool the French intelligence agents who would question him when he returned.
The extent of his travels, the funds at his disposal, and his network of relationships gave rise after his death to a conspiracy theory that saw him as an informer for the secret services, which were thought to have deliberately had him killed at the end of the siege of his home in Toulouse to prevent him from revealing the nature of their relationship. Between mid-August and mid-October 2011, he went to Pakistan, where in the local Taliban camps he was briefly trained in the handling of weapons. Merah completed his jihadist transformation on site, as Al-Suri recommended, and it included military training, no matter how basic it might have been.
Mohamed Merah’s acts gave rise to a lively media debate on the poor performance of the French intelligence service, which was said to have failed to gauge correctly the danger posed by an individual on whom it had a file and whom it was monitoring. At the time of this writing, this debate cannot be truly substantive, because the evidence in the file remains confidential. As President Hollande’s five-year term was reaching its end, the case had not yet been tried, though the affair took place at the outset of the campaign that would lead to his election and under his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy. This favored the proliferation of conspiracy theories on social media ranging from the “Islamosphere” to the “Dieudosphère”—the large Web network that revolves around humorist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala and his mentor, Alain Soral.
Nonetheless, we can propose a hypothesis: the new model of Islamist terrorism had not yet been assimilated by national intelligence agencies. At that time, they were resting on their laurels, France having gone sixteen years without an attack as a result of their great effectiveness in the battle against the second wave of jihadism, that of al-Qaeda. They were caught off guard, unable to grasp the third wave’s “software”—which had, however, been clearly outlined by al-Suri. Because the French government failed to understand that the phenomenon was not exclusively a problem of security, and because it treated only the symptoms while refusing to exhume their social, political, and religious roots and to devote the necessary means to determining their causes, the French political elite doomed itself to waiting for the next occurrence.
Since 2010, alongside the establishment of underground jihadist networks that hardened an avant-garde of militants, there have been other warning signs that a certain kind of Salafist discourse in the public sphere and on the Web and social media was moving toward violence. The growing trend toward identity politics that appeared during that year increased the visibility of markers of Islamization in the banlieues. The object was to radicalize those on the fringes of the religion, galvanizing them by denouncing the oppression that Islam allegedly suffered in France, which was popularized under the name of “Islamophobia.”
The October 11, 2010, law prohibiting the covering of the face in public spaces targeted the wearing of the niqab, which most Salafists consider an article of faith. This law provided a pretext for increasing radicalization on social media and for engaging in provocative acts of civil disobedience. In some banlieues, women, a number of them converts, deliberately walked about wearing full-body and face veils to taunt the police, compelling them to enforce the law. Such incidents were intended to arouse feelings of solidarity among other Muslims and to expand the circle of sympathizers. This was part of a larger strategy of increasing tension between religions that involved threats and violence.
In July 2013, during Ramadan, when the police checked the papers of a young Caribbean woman who was wearing a niqab on the street in the town of Trappes, one of the western banlieues of Paris, the situation deteriorated into riots. Images of these riots, broadcast by the Islamist site Islam & Info, decried a manifestation of Islamophobia on the part of the authorities. In this verdant town in the département of Yvelines, the high-rise housing project had been demolished on the recommendation of ANRU and replaced by attractive new apartment buildings. In addition, a mosque that could hold 2,400 worshipers had been constructed with the backing of the Socialist mayor.
Nevertheless, Rachid Benzine, a scholar of Islam and a native of Trappes, saw Salafization progressing rapidly there. He defined it as “the model that is easiest to follow, the set of solutions that has an answer for everything in times of trouble.” This municipality of some thirty thousand people is the birthplace of the movie stars Jamel Debbouze and Omar Sy and the football player Nicolas Anelka, models of success in the American fashion and of the integration of children of immigrants into the society of the spectacle4 during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, more than eighty residents are thought to have joined the Syrian jihad in 2015.
However, the movement that triggered this process of Salafist radicalization in the media proved ephemeral. It appeared during summer 2010 and was dissolved on March 1, 2012, by President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was running for re-election, two weeks before the Merah killings in Montauban and Toulouse. Named Forsane Alizza (Knights of Pride), it was organized by Mohamed Achamlane, who lived in Nantes, Brittany. The son of a Moroccan father and a Breton mother, he had four children and was living on public assistance. He called himself Sheikh Abu Hamza. Sarkozy issued the decree dissolving the group on the grounds that “because of its structured organization, the religious indoctrination dispensed to its members, and its practice of providing training in hand-to-hand combat and hostage-taking, it has the character of a militant group.” This legal provision, enacted in 1936, was originally intended to fight the fascist leagues that had organized riots on February 6, 1934.
In particular, the decree noted that
the de facto group “Forsane Alizza,” by calling for the establishment of the caliphate and the application of sharia in France, challenges the democratic government and fundamental principles of the French Republic, which are secularism (laïcité) and respect for individual freedom; that by inciting Muslims to unite in order to take part in a civil war presented as very probable and by preparing its members for combat and armed warfare, this group’s goal is to attack by force the republican form of the government [… and] that moreover, the ideology thus propagated has been further pursued in connection with public demonstrations.
For initiates, the name of Forsane Alizza has explicit jihadist connotations, as “knights” alludes to Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s manifesto advocating the strategy that led to September 11. The Arabic term for knight (faris, the singular of forsane) is habitually used in the jihadist educational videos from Syria to designate those engaged in the holy war there.
As for Abu Hamza, the pseudonym of Mohamed Achamlane, it is the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s uncle but is also the nom de guerre (kunia in Arabic) of the famous Anglo-Egyptian jihadist Abu Hamza al-Masri. Calling for the strict implementation of sharia in Europe and support for al-Qaeda, this London-based imam, who supported the Algerian GIA in the 1990s, succeeded Abu Musab al-Suri at the head of the magazine Al-Ansar. A veteran of Afghanistan, where he lost his right hand in an attack and replaced it with a hook, he was imprisoned in the United Kingdom and then extradited to the United States in April 2012. There he would be tried, in January 2015, for kidnapping and taking hostages in Yemen, then sentenced to life imprisonment.
Forsane Alizza sought to exercise its “right to legitimate self-defense” on behalf of those who had been “victims of Islamophobic aggression.” Though it embodied in its own way the radical avant-garde that al-Suri called for, the group drew its inspiration and its mode of action from a variety of sources. The Salafist reference and the exemplary videos of armed jihad in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine broadcast on its website were combined with agitprop and attacks that are reminiscent of the ultra-leftism of the Gauche Prolétarienne (Proletarian Left)5 in the 1970s. However, the pictorial vocabulary of the videos came directly from comic books and the adventures of superheroes, in particular Marvel’s X-Men.
The founder of the movement was first known under the pseudonym “Cortex,” which he took from the animated television series Minus et Cortex, known in English as Pinky and the Brain. One of the two protagonists of this iconic show for members of Generation Y, Cortex, or Brain, is a highly intelligent laboratory rat who thinks up a new plot to conquer the world every day.
The group engaged in provocative coups de main that they duly filmed and posted online. One of them was the occupation of a McDonald’s in Limoges—a city in the center of France—in June 2010 to protest against the ties between the company and “Zionism.” Another, in August 2011, consisted of burning a copy of the French penal code in front of police headquarters in Aulnay-sous-Bois, one of the epicenters of the 2005 riots, in order to protest the law prohibiting the concealment of the face (and the wearing of the niqab) in public. This also recalled the 1989 burning in Bradford of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses by Sunni Islamists who viewed it as an insult to the Prophet.
Forsane Alizza also specialized in fighting against its opposite numbers on the right, the anti-Islamist groups of Français de souche (French Natives) and Riposte laïque (Secular Response), by organizing, for example, a counter-demonstration on the occasion of the Assises de l’islamisation, an anti-Islamist gathering held in Paris in December 2010. Forsane Alizza’s actions recall those of leftists fighting against the far right during the preceding decades. Some of these actions, intended to intimidate “infidels” in the name of “self-defense,” often involved violence—especially verbal violence, but sometimes physical. They were often filmed and then posted on social media sites. Despite the histrionics of Achamlane/Abu Hamza, whose absurdity several of his adversaries in the Salafist movement mocked, Forsane Alizza was the first French Islamist group to display violence on the Internet, to systematically justify it, and to threaten repeatedly to inflict it—but without actually doing so.
Historically, Forsane Alizza played a pivotal role in the transition between the jihadism of the 1990s, a decade during which the Algerian civil war overflowed into France under the management of Khaled Kelkal of Lyon, and the new outbreak in the first decade of the twenty-first century in both France and Syria. Representatives of both generations were among the movement’s members and sympathizers. One representative of the older generation was fifty-year-old Baroudi Bouzid, from Lyon, one of the co-defendants in the Forsane Alizza trial held in the spring of 2015, who was sentenced to six years in prison. The current generation was incarnated in the main video recruiter of jihadists for Syria, Omar Omsen, who came from Senegal, grew up in Nice, and left to fight in Syria with the al-Nusra Front, as well as in Émilie König, the daughter of a French gendarme who had converted to Islam and left for Syria in 2012. She was very active online, and in 2014, the United States placed her on its list of foreign combatants. In addition, journalistic sources indicate that in April 2011, a militant belonging to this group, which was also established in the Midi-Pyrénées region, may have paid a visit to Mohamed Merah in Toulouse.
On March 30, 2012, in the wake of Merah’s death, and when the campaign for the presidential election was in full swing, a roundup in Islamist milieus targeted Forsane Alizza, especially in the Toulouse banlieue of Le Mirail. Mohamed Achamlane, alias Sheikh Abu Hamza, and a dozen of his close associates were incarcerated, though others quietly set out for Syria. One of the people picked up on March 30, 2012, and later released was arrested again in September 2014, carrying weapons in the banlieues of Lyon. Some of his siblings were suspected of having joined the jihad in Syria and having helped young French women to do the same. A girl of thirteen, religiously married to a jihadist, was found in their Lyon home, which also contained an arsenal.
The trial of the fifteen members of the movement who were indicted, seven of whom were in temporary detention, was held in Paris between the killings at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher in January 2015 and the massacre at the Bataclan in November of the same year. The eldest of the accused, Baroudi Bouzid, was born in Algeria in August 1962, one month after independence. In the 1980s, he became the imam of a mosque in Givors, in the Lyon area, and during the following decade, he associated with a convert who belonged to the “Chasse-sur-Rhône network,” an Islamist group based in a nearby derelict industrial town that was involved in the 1995 attacks, and whose trial was to take place four years later. Bouzid’s children had been taken away from him by the courts because he had isolated them from French society and had refused to send them to school. In a video mentioned during the hearing, he declared that “the French state did not hesitate to do anything to destroy the imam who was disturbing the Republic.” During his religious work, he had constantly called (da’wa) “to Allah, to the Tawhid [the uniqueness of God, the criterion par excellence emphasized by the Salafists], to jihad and to the caliphate.” After he contacted Forsane Alizza, the group decided to make the loss of his parental rights an emblematic case of Islamophobia, and imam Bouzid became a kind of religious mentor for the faithful. When his home was searched, an elegy (madh) in Arabic, addressed to Mohamed Merah, “who has destroyed the party of Satan with Allah’s help” and who was “chosen by Allah as a martyr,” was found and presented at the hearing.
Earlier, in September 2011, a meeting had been held in Givors, attended by numerous members and sympathizers of the group from various regions of France, to determine the type of action to be undertaken in order to publicize the affair of Bouzid’s children. The conclusions drawn were confused and the versions given by the participants contradictory, but one of them, who had just been released from prison, made himself the subject of much discussion for the next four years. Omar Diaby, known as Omar “Omsen” because he came from Senegal, became the French jihadists’ main cyber-recruiter; his extremely popular videos consisted of an elaborated variation on the theme created by Forsane Alizza, to which they render ringing homage, making the group’s “persecution” by the infidel French government a major argument for shifting the jihad to Syria.
Having moved from Senegal to Nice with his family at the age of seven, in the late 1970s, Omar Omsen fell into delinquency in his adolescence. Though the famous Promenade des Anglais may be what comes to mind when one thinks of Nice, the Ariane neighborhood on the eastern periphery of the city, where he went to school, is its polar opposite (as the Bastille Day 2016 jihadist attack on the Promenade would remind us later). The former evokes the charm of an area famous all over the world for its tourist attractions, whereas the latter, which has a very bad reputation, calls up images of low-cost high-rise housing projects constructed below the highway, out of sight for the summer tourists, between the waste disposal plant and the cemetery. This is the dark side of the French Riviera, where drug dealers dominate the streets, marks of Islamization have been multiplying since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and Salafism has gained a following.
Armed robberies in Monte Carlo earned Omar Omsen a great deal of prestige in the underworld and several years in prison. And it was there that, like so many others, he mixed Salafist doctrine and his past as a violent gangster in an Islamist radicalization that retroactively justified his criminal behavior by reorienting it toward the pious goal of jihad. When he was released in 2011, he strengthened his ties to Forsane Alizza, several of whose followers had profiles comparable to his own. The group had a few important members in Nice, including the Franco-Tunisian “Osama,” who took his converted girlfriend to Syria, as well as a telephone company employee who supplied the movement with the addresses of “infidels” against whom punitive operations could be launched.
Taking this group’s audiovisual productions as his model, he began to cobble together a series of videos meant to tell the true history of humanity. This account was based on the premise that history leads to universal redemption through the Syrian jihad. He posted it on the Internet, where it became a very important tool for recruiting French youths, as is shown both by court cases and by interviews with the families of jihadists and those at risk conducted by the author of this book, as well as by journalists and by associations responsible for preventing such departures.
But in late 2011, Syria was not yet the magnet it would become the following year, when civil war would begin on a grand scale. For lack of opportunities in Syria, even Mohamed Merah had to complete his military training in the Pakistani tribal areas under the control of the Taliban. A few dozen aficionados of Omar Omsen’s first videos—in 2015, the videos had been viewed more than a hundred thousand times—decided to transform their imaginary world into a reality and met for that purpose in Nice, on Friday, December 9, 2011, two months after Omsen took part in the meeting with Forsane Alizza in Givors. They came from all over France, by plane or by train, to prepare themselves to depart for the jihad, which was at that time limited mainly to the “AfPak” zone (Afghanistan-Pakistan) and Yemen. The meeting’s goal was to explain the scriptural basis for the permissibility of this hegira, or migration, to the land of Islam and to discuss practical considerations.
The members of the sect planned to go first to Tunisia, where the victory of the Islamist party Ennahda in the elections held in October of that year gave the Salafist jihadists greater latitude, and then to Libya, where the death of Colonel Gaddafi had effectively dissolved the state. Most of the Islamists from Nice were Tunisians, like most of the Muslims in Alpes-Maritimes, and they had numerous contacts there. According to the account his wife and friends posted on the main francophone jihadist site, Ansar-al haqq (The Partisans of the Truth), Omsen was arrested by the police at the Nice train station, where he had gone to meet “brothers” after the Friday prayers, and incarcerated on the pretext of a seven-year-old criminal charge. He was tried immediately and sentenced to a term of two years in prison, which he was still serving when Forsane Alizza was dissolved. One year later, in March 2013, he was released from prison and deported to Senegal the following month.
The police operation that caused the collapse of the plan for a collective hegira had its origin in the surveillance of the jihadist forums that summoned people to the meeting in Nice. In 2011, the limited number of these forums made this task still feasible. The profusion of dedicated Facebook pages later changed the situation, hindering the intelligence services’ capacities. In July 2013, after having put the final touches on the videos and posting them online, Omsen joined the Syrian jihad, leaving Tunis on a ship bound for Istanbul, a voyage he filmed and used in the episode “Destination Holy Land.” This episode was the apogee, in the form of a selfie, of the video series 19 HH, The History of Humanity, which was centered on the person of the charismatic guru himself, and it proliferated all over the Web.
Once he arrived in the “land of Sham,”6 as Syria and the Levant are called, he became the “spiritual emir” of a French katiba (phalanx) of the al-Nusra Front, the local branch of al-Qaeda. The hegira of numerous French people is attributed to his influence, and no doubt it must be considered one of the reasons why the idyllic French Riviera has provided a contingent of fighters in Syria almost as large as that of Seine-Saint-Denis, representing about a tenth of all those from France. The prevalence of this radical contingent in the region perhaps also explains why Nice was the locus of the deadly attack of July 14, 2016, that caused eighty-six deaths.
In August 2015, the death of Omar Omsen was announced on social media sites, but this report was refuted by Omsen’s appearance on a television broadcast in June 2016, in which he engaged in a critique of ISIS’s strategy. After two years in the area, the original charisma of the jihad’s main video maker had been blurred by the bloody conflicts between the al-Nusra Front, to which he had pledged allegiance, and its rivals in ISIS, who had attracted the largest contingent of French fighters. But he remained famous for his exceptional abilities as an online propagandist, a key vector for understanding the rationale of the French jihadist commitment, of which he had constructed the founding narrative.
The trailer for the three films in the series, beginning with The Creation of the World and ending with The Final Confrontation, was made in 2013, the year when its creator arrived in Syria to give his virtual characters a flesh-and-blood reality. The video passed on via Facebook in order to evade the potential censorship of file-sharing sites. It flourished far beyond the Islamist movement in the strict sense, penetrating in particular the Dieudosphère (Dieudonné’s websites), a number of whose semantic codes it adopted. It can be found, for example, on the Libre Penseur (Freethinker) site of the Marseille dentist Salim Laïbi, who ran as a candidate in the parliamentary elections of June 2012 with the active backing of Dieudonné and Alain Soral. The video was posted on his blog with the note: “Here is a very interesting documentary on Islamophobic media manipulation. A must-see!”
The similarities between the grand conspiracy theory narrative that the videos on Soral’s site Égalité et réconciliation (Equality and Reconciliation) rehearse at length and 19 HH’s worldview are striking: their basic argumentation consists in deconstructing television news reports, which they present as a web of lies intended to enslave humanity to the American-Zionist “Empire,” in the case of Soral, and to Ibliss (Satan), in the case of 19 HH. They espouse a sort of Manichean conception of the Universe, viewing everything as a struggle between Good and Evil, which must be denounced at every opportunity. This situates the Salafist view in a much larger “antisystem” discourse whose rhetoric it shares and many of whose followers it has succeeded in capturing. Such a view was attractive even to people who were initially non-Muslims or simply not religious, thanks to its holistic structure and especially to the militant commitment to which it leads: the jihad to drive out Evil and achieve Good, as proclaimed by the Islamic motto al amr bi-l ma’rouf wa-l nahi ‘an al mounkar.
19 HH is nothing more than a long montage of sequences telescoped in a quasi-professional style, making extensive use of special effects and slow motion. The videos alternate between synthesized images, news shows, interviews with “intellectuals” and experts both legitimate and dubious, and clips from films, nature documentaries, and even amateur videos made for the occasion.
This “mash-up,” which takes its jerky delivery from the tempo of rap music, is narrated by the voice of Omar Omsen. He has the slightly guttural accent of the French spoken in Senegal, polished by his stay in Nice and given its rhythm by the choppy scansion that characterizes protest speech in the banlieues. He constantly challenges the viewer in the name of the Truth and urges him to question the dominant ideology of “atheism,” basing his arguments on quotations from the Quran and hadith, the Prophet’s sayings. The path to salvation is traced out by holding up jihadi combatants like Osama bin Laden as tutelary figures and the Syrian battlefield as the means of fulfillment hic et nunc. Lacking musical accompaniment—according to the Salafists, music is inspired by the Devil—the mesmerizing anachid (chants) of male choruses intoning Islamic hymns a capella is part of the almost hallucinatory dimension of this hour-long video.
The first twenty-five minutes make the point clear by conferring on French Muslims the quality of victims par excellence. This situates the video in the logic of the battle against “Islamophobia,” the buzzword of the Islamist movement in general and the point of departure for the denunciation of Zionism, which allegedly usurps, through the lies of the media in thrall to the Jews, this same victimization in the name of the Shoah. It begins with a point-by-point review of the Merah case, which was the origin of the ultimate sequence of jihadism and of its shift to violence. Noting that it happened shortly before the 2012 presidential election, the voiceover explains that Muslims have paid the price for “the presidential election show.” The video continues with images of the arrest of members of Forsane Alizza in late March 2012, of Omar Omsen in Nice in December of the preceding year, and of many “visible Muslims” (despite the fact that many of them were rapidly found innocent of the charge of belonging to terrorist movements):
So they set out to persecute disruptive Muslims, clearly in order to destroy their image among other believers, and so that the latter will disavow them and change sides […]. Those who want to silence “disruptive Muslims” always use the same method: when these Muslims denounce falsehood and call for truth, they are systematically imprisoned, eliminated, and this happens all over the world. […] Politicians have constructed lies about them, about us, and about other Muslims who are more anonymous, in order to make them into juicy media items.
Sometimes the voiceover is replaced by text that appears in capital letters on the screen to lend the authority of writing to the remarks made. The graphic codes used—metallic gray background, bordered with two horizontal bands striated in yellow and black—recall futuristic video games that were popular around the turn of the century, like Unreal Tournament or Half-Life.
Their control over the media gives them the power to show what they wish, how they wish, and when they wish, they can choose to change things and influence the masses in the direction they desire […]. In the name of so-called security […] propaganda against Islam has begun!
In the numerous illustrations of this theme, disparate scenes are shown in a continuous sequence for effect. Images of Israeli children in their school bus singing hymns urging people to kill Arabs are juxtaposed with a regional television report about the use of plastic explosives to blow up the homes of Arabs living in Corsica, thus suggesting a perfect congruence between the fate of French Muslims and that of Palestinians.
After a quotation from the hadiths condemning “those who fight against the religion of Allah,” the video tells the viewer that the cause of the problem is the secular school system that teaches the false laws of evolution and not divine creationism. Another mash-up of images ridiculing evolutionism is accompanied by a voiceover spoken by a boy:
In school, the teacher taught us that man was descended from apes, and at home Mama told me that it was God who created us. […] I always thought my mother was right. […] Then I grew up, the world was on the wrong track, and when I looked more closely, I saw that it was people who were on the wrong track.
The proof is provided by a return to the montage of images taken from television news programs showing the then French minister of justice, Christiane Taubira, defending the law authorizing gay marriage, elected officials supporting surrogate gestation for gay parents, and extracts from a fictional film in which a husband and wife visit a doctor to order a son “with white skin, brown hair, and brown eyes.”
The voiceover explains the cause and the consequences:
That goes back to May 1968 […]. The atheists were growing more numerous, as if they were the norm, as if it was they who had understood everything, who were the most intelligent, and everyone else was stupid. The Christians were the nice ones, the kind ones […], everybody left them alone. The Jews, it was like they were porcelain dolls, they had to be protected. And the Muslims were not liked, they were on the fringe of society. Why were Muslims taken as targets? […] The problem with Muslims was that their voices were not unified and that there were no bonds of fraternity among Muslims throughout the world, even though they are all brothers. When a problem occurred in a country, they didn’t do anything. […] I grew up between two cultures, and one of them was predominant, because of the context. My parents told me it was haram [illicit], without explaining religion to me. And then one day the world changed!
Images of the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11 then take over the screen, showing the irrepressible emergence of Truth striking a major blow against the Satanic lies of the American-Zionist conspiracy.
When he or she gets this far, the viewer has become “an awakened one” (éveillé), to use the term found in Alain Soral’s videos and Dieudonné’s shows. However, here the fascist Internet community and its jihadist counterpart begin to diverge: whereas the first deviates toward French identity politics, the second leads to belligerent jihadist Salafism. But on the way to the latter, there are still obstacles to be overcome. There is a perilous bifurcation on the path of Islam: one path leads to error, the other to truth. The illusory path is the one that Omar Omsen’s voiceover calls minhaj salafiyya (the path of Salafism), as its partisans espouse the view that “the hearts of believers have to be changed before society is changed.” These are only “pseudo-Salafists,” or talafis, a scornful nickname formed from the Arabic root talafa (to be degraded or corrupted). On the other hand, for those who follow the right path
there is another solution: defensive jihad […]. These are Muslims who cannot tolerate inaction when faced by men and women who are being killed as a matter of course!
Then the screen is filled with images of massacred Muslims, in particular the mutilated and bleeding bodies of children and babies killed in the course of bombardments attributed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad or to Israel. Confronted by such ignominy, the blind passivity of the “pseudo-Salafists” amounts to culpability. Then come sequences showing graying sheikhs in the Gulf States being praised by President Obama, which are contrasted with images of black-bearded jihad fighters carrying Kalashnikovs and trench knives.
The options open to Muslims “awakened” by September 11 are made explicit by a drawing in which one sees on the left of the screen a blindfolded face and on the right a man wearing a black hood, staring at the viewer. Fighting and defending oneself, the voiceover explains, is a fard ‘ayn—an individual obligation for every aware Muslim. That is the path that believers must follow; today, they are lost, some of them calling upon “science and patience,” whereas the others are passionately eager to act, as they should.
How can the lost be persuaded to immediately join in armed jihad? Through teaching. The indoctrination videos put out by 19 HH are rewriting the true “history of humanity.” The acronym HH stands for this term and at the same time represents the World Trade Center’s twin towers, whose destruction marked the advent of the era of Truth. Thus it is possible to “understand why man was created, why Allah created a being named Ibliss (Satan) who fights us day and night.” And this genealogical perspective can lead only to fulfillment through armed jihad.
All through Nicolas Sarkozy’s term as president, French jihadism constructed a complex and interconnected world in which Mohamed Merah, Omar Omsen, the Artigat commune, and Forsane Alizza all played a part. Although the movement’s genesis goes back to the 1990s, and although some of its oldest activists frequented the Kelkal network and transmitted the memory of the last occurrences of jihadist violence in France, it was really starting with the Iraqi jihad between 2003 and 2005 that was gradually restructured around a new generation, not yet numerous, of which the groups in Buttes-Chaumont and Artigat are representative. This generation shared the experiences of the Iraqi battlefield and of prison, and it was beginning to construct heroicized figures that would serve as models for various types of young sympathizers.
Although proselytizers took full advantage of the prison milieu, this was not the only sphere in which they had influence. The congruence of the Salafist model with the demand for radical change formerly conveyed by leftists, countercultural movements, and hippies was shown by, in particular, the example of Artigat. We have seen how that kind of Salafism, which was originally pietist, was able to harden under favorable circumstances, just as happened in the case of soft leftism and terrorist organizations such as Action directe and the German Red Army Faction.
However, the main change, which was qualitative as well as quantitative, between the jihadist generation of the 1990s and the one that emerged in 2005 and literally exploded with the Merah affair, was caused by the digital revolution. It expanded to the whole world a battlefield that had previously been limited to particular regions, such as Algeria or Bosnia. It made it possible to give faraway conflicts an immediate resonance, which explains the difference between French Muslims’ experience of the conflict in Iraq between 2003 and 2005 and of that in Syria several years later. Above all, the digital revolution favored movement—in both the concrete and the symbolic senses—between spaces: French jihad was continued in Syria and vice versa.
This shows the importance of video production, and of control over it, to this process. We have seen how Forsane Alizza’s videos served as a “dress rehearsal” for actual violence and how they simultaneously forged a connection with the earlier generation and used Generation Y’s cultural codes to amplify their message in milieus that would otherwise not have been affected. The unprecedented number of converts and young women who have been won over by this ideology, and who have followed through with the commitment that it implies, testifies to that.
If the “comic-book” side of Forsane Alizza limited its impact and led some of its members into the nets of the police and the courts, the next step was left to Omar Omsen. His video series 19 HH summed up the preceding elements in a convincing way by constructing a grand deductive and didactic narrative that also borrowed from the conspiracy theory of the Dieudosphère to increase its attractiveness. Beginning with Allah’s creation of the world to the evil spells of Ibliss (Satan), passing by way of the parousia of September 11, and then touching on the Merah affair and the Syrian jihad, Omsen was able to produce the narrative that would be the most effective vector of recruitment. It was powerful because it forged a view of the world that led to a commitment to overthrow that world through extreme violence in order to give birth to the Good and the True.
When Nicolas Sarkozy left the political scene at the end of a term of office that closed with the Merah affair, it was still impossible to untangle all this. It was only with the rush of events under his successor that the scenes of this drama began to fall into place.
1 A person of European origin or descent who was born lived in Algeria and who migrated to France after Algeria became independent. The nickname came from the fact that Europeans wore black shoes—hence “pieds noirs” (black feet).
2 Larzac is an isolated region in southwestern France that was the site of protests against the expansion of a military camp (1971) and neoliberal trade policies (2003). It became a byword for communities of former leftists going back to rural areas and raising sheep. Mandarom is a temple in the French Alps erected by the “Aumism” sect to establish itself in the wilderness of the mountains. The Order of the Solar Temple is a secret society associated with a series of murders and mass suicides in 1994 and 1995.
3 A French revolutionary group that committed a series of assassinations and violent attacks in France between 1979 and 1987.
4 An allusion to Guy Debord’s 1967 book La Société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle).
5 A radical Maoist group founded in September 1968 that led daring attacks and provocations against the “bourgeois” French state.
6 See pp. 125, for the Islamic significance of Sham to Salafists and jihadists.