During the development of the Merah affair, a twenty-seven-year-old repeat offender, Mehdi Nemmouche, imprisoned in Toulon-La Farlède, a penitentiary in the Southeast of France on the Mediterranean where he was serving a fifth sentence, asked for a television set to follow—“with jubilation,” according to the guards—the saga of the killer on a scooter. By an astonishing coincidence, in December 2007, Nemmouche’s most recent conviction had been for an attempt to steal at gunpoint, from a Yahama dealer in Saint-Laurent-du-Var on the French Riviera, the same model of T-Max scooter that Mohamed Merah used when committing his murders.
At the time of this attempted robbery, he was still only an awkward petty delinquent who had been born in the Harki1 milieu in Roubaix, a once famous mill town on the border with Belgium that was now the poorest of all French cities. His father was unknown; he was put in various daycare centers and then was placed in contact with his mother’s family in La Bourgogne, a troubled neighborhood in Tourcoing, a city adjacent to Roubaix. Like Mohamed Merah and the Kouachi brothers, he was cared for by institutions charged with the responsibility of protecting young people, but he spent his childhood—again, like the perpetrators of the other two massacres—in a broken family world, with no father figure present. The subject of multiple arrests, indictments, and then terms in prison for theft and violence, he had showed no interest in religion before his last theft, which earned him five years behind bars, from December 2007 to December 2012. Unlike Mohamed Merah, for whom incarcerations served only to reinforce a radicalization that had begun in his family environment and in the Salafist environment of the Midi-Pyrénées, it did not seem, in view of the information available before the trial, that Mehdi Nemmouche had been approached by the Salafist movement in Roubaix, which was nonetheless very active in a city that had become a seedbed for Syrian jihad volunteers.
MEHDI NEMMOUCHE, DETAINEE AND JAILER
Nemmouche’s Islamization occurred during the five years he spent in the prison incubator between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-seven. With no family ties that might have provided him with moral support during his detention, he remained isolated in the penitentiaries of the south of France. It is not rare, in a prison where Islam predominates, for an individual stigmatized for belonging to a minority or other deviant group to turn this stigma into a source of religious pride, if only to survive the pressure brought to bear by fellow prisoners.
For some young people from Harki backgrounds whose parents were viewed as “traitors” by the children of other Algerian immigrants, a scrupulous adherence to all the outward signs and rituals of Salafism served both as a source of pride and as a way to delegitimize the children of activists for the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), whom they associated with the “apostate” state in Algiers. In Nemmouche’s native city of Roubaix in particular, Harki children are overrepresented in the associative network and Salafist mosques.2
As a Harki son and as one who was doubly stigmatized by the honor codes of the disenfranchised banlieues as ould al h’ram (a child of sin, a bastard) because his father was unknown, Mehdi Nemmouche may well have sought, during his last incarceration, to exorcise his demons through an intense form of Islamization. In any case, this Islamization was achieved in the company of prisoners who were already militants, starting in 2009 at the detention center in Salon-de-Provence, where he was identified by the Department of Corrections intelligence service as a radical Islamist, and then especially in the detention center in Toulon, where he was held from March 2011 until his release in early December 2012.
Eager for information about the most rigorous injunctions in order to throw himself headlong into a suddenly discovered faith, Nemmouche moved closer to a support group for Muslim detainees called Salsabil (Ear of Wheat). This group was founded in 2010 but would be dissolved in November 2016 by the French Ministry of the Interior, as it was suspected to have served as a network for jihadist inmates. He quickly grew a beard, started wearing a djellaba,3 and engaged in ardent proselytizing among the other prisoners. But his aggressiveness toward the guards, whom he bombarded with projectiles, caused him to be placed in a disciplinary area and then in solitary confinement until he completed his sentence.
After he was released, Nemmouche went to Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, a town on the outskirts of Brussels and a seedbed of jihadism, where the November 2015 massacres in Paris and Saint-Denis would soon be planned. On New Year’s Eve 2012, he flew out of Brussels, passing through the United Kingdom, Lebanon, and Turkey before finally joining the ranks of ISIS in Syria. The complex logistics and cost of this itinerary, like that of his return trip through Malaysia and Thailand, could not possibly have been managed alone by the ex-con Nemmouche, with his lack of foreign travel experience and his modest savings from his past career as a thief. He clearly required help—specifically, a network of contacts and financing.
Nemmouche’s journey recalls Mohamed Merah’s similarly complex peregrinations between Algeria and Tajikistan. But whereas Merah’s jihadist training in the use of weapons ended abruptly in a Taliban camp in Pakistan in autumn 2011, the year when the Arab upheavals exploded, Nemmouche was able to benefit fully from training in warfare in Syria a year and a half later, when by 2013 the Islamists had begun to control a vast area in which they imposed strict sharia law.
We have firsthand testimony about his time in Syria. In a role reversal after five years of incarceration, the ex-con was transformed into a jailer, assigned to guard prisoners held in the cellars of a former hospital in Aleppo that had come under ISIS control. Among these prisoners were four French hostages, including the journalists Didier François and Nicolas Hénin, who had been kidnapped in June 2013 and who would be freed in late April 2014—though not without having suffered abuse at the hands of a particularly sadistic French guard of North African origin. Didier François, a former member of the Communist Revolutionary League (the French section of the Trotskyist Fourth International), had been not only one of the founders of SOS Racisme in 1983 but also the inventor of the movement’s pet slogan, Touche pas à mon pote (“Hands off my buddy”), which at that time always appeared alongside an illustration of a little yellow hand that combined the shape of the North African hamsa or Fatima’s hand amulet—a protective talisman—and the color of the infamous yellow star that European Jews had to wear under the Nazi yoke. The terrifying paradox—that thirty years after Touche pas à mon pote the inventor of the slogan found himself held hostage in a Syrian dungeon by an Islamist group, mistreated by one of the children of these same “buddies” whose protector he had been—casts a particularly cruel light on the last quarter-century.
In September 2014, Didier François’s fellow hostage Nicolas Hénin revealed publicly that he had recognized Nemmouche, who had been arrested in Marseille the previous May, as his jailer. The radicalized neo-Salafist had hummed French hit songs as he tortured the Syrian captives. In addition, Nemmouche taunted his compatriots François and Hénin by sharing with them his fascination with the famous television series Faites entrer l’accusé,4 which tells the stories of various notorious criminals. This petty thief who had become an Islamist projected himself onto these negative role models while combining the political grammar of third-generation jihadism with the mental vocabulary of a French youth brought up on pop television culture, even though he refused to watch infidel television while he was in detention (except to follow the Merah affair).
This kind of hybridization, encapsulated in the title of Nicolas Hénin’s book describing his captivity, Djihad Academy (alluding to the famous reality television show Star Academy), is the key to the success of jihadist mastermind Abu Musab al-Suri’s plan to place European jihadists at the heart of his campaign. After conditioning them by means of high doses of indoctrination and military training, and after they had grown accustomed to inflicting violence in the name of Islam, as they interpreted it, on the dehumanized victims of ISIS, these jihadists would be primed to return to Europe, there to light the fires of civil war. In this sense, Nemmouche incarnates the ideal type of the third-generation jihadist in his exploits as well as in his limitations.
In addition, the ongoing judicial procedures reported in the press indicate that Nemmouche, far from corresponding to the pseudo-model of the “lone wolf” emphasized by some superficial analysts, is thought to have been assigned to the jail in Aleppo under the orders of Salim Benghalem, one of ISIS’s highest-ranking French jihadists. Born in 1980 in Bourg-la-Reine, in the southern outskirts of Paris, into a family whose other members were perfectly integrated into society, at the age of seventeen Salim began dealing drugs and then was sentenced in 2002 to eleven years in prison for having committed murder in the course of a confrontation between rival gangs in the housing projects in Cachan, also on the southern edge of the capital city, where he lived.
Before his incarceration, Benghalem moved closer to the jihadist group based in Buttes-Chaumont park in the northeast of Paris, where he met the Kouachi brothers, thus attracting the attention of the French intelligence agency. Although he did not go to Iraq, he was in the same prison cell as Mohamed al-Ayouni, who had been arrested on his return from the jihad, in the course of which he had lost an eye and an arm in 2004 during the battle of Fallujah against coalition troops led by the United States. Whereas Ayouni was found guilty in 2008, along with Chérif Kouachi, Benghalem was released. Here again, with prison playing its usual role as an incubator of jihadist terrorism, Benghalem became a de facto member of the terrorist network that planned and executed the attacks of January 2015.
In July 2010, with Amedy Coulibaly and Djamel Beghal, Salim Benghalem was arrested in the attempted jailbreak of Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem, the explosives expert behind a series of Islamist terrorist attacks on French soil in 1995. After being released from police custody, Benghalem flew in July 2011 to Oman and then to Yemen in the company of one of the Kouachi brothers in order to be trained in jihad under the auspices of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). After a brief return to France, he joined the Syrian jihad in April 2013, initially in the ranks of the al-Nusra Front, the local al-Qaeda franchise and a sister organization of AQAP, and then in ISIS, where he held positions in the movement’s hierarchy.
On February 12, 2015, a month after the Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket killings in Paris, Benghalem appeared unmasked in a video praising the perpetrators of these massacres, whom he knew well, and encouraging his co-religionists in France to imitate their example. “Kill them with knives, or at least spit in their faces, but disavow them!” he exclaimed, thus translating, in a way, the recommendations formulated in 2005 in Abu Musab al-Suri’s Call to Global Islamic Resistance. It was this high-ranking activist—Salim Benghalem—who took Mehdi Nemmouche as his acolyte at the jail in Aleppo. This is how a jihadist network took a socially disconnected, intellectual lightweight ex-con and weaponized him, propelling him out of the misfortune that marked his birth in Roubaix and into a worldwide jihad.
However, Nemmouche’s fortuitous arrest during a routine customs inspection at the bus station in Marseille on May 30, 2014, where he was found with an arsenal of weapons used in his attack on the Jewish Museum of Brussels the week prior,5 reveals one of the main strategic weaknesses of third-generation jihadism. The latter relies on delegating to unstable individuals the responsibility of choosing when and how to enact jihad.
In fact Nemmouche’s fortuitous arrest was brought about by his decision to board a cheap bus that regularly made the run from Amsterdam to Marseille via Brussels. The police knew that this bus route was often taken by small-time hashish dealers going to buy their supplies in Dutch coffee shops, and it was almost always inspected by customs officials upon its arrival in Marseille. Nemmouche’s error would never have been committed at the time of al-Qaeda, when the organization planned the September 11 attacks in advance with the meticulousness of a secret service. This same sort of amateurism made it possible to foil two other jihadist attacks the following year: an attack on a church in the southern Parisian commune of Villejuif being planned by Sid Ahmed Ghlam and a massacre that Ayoub el-Khazzani was getting ready to commit on board a train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris.
Here we see the operational limits of the slogan Nizam, la tanzim (a system, not an organization) that had been popularized by al-Suri and that distinguished his program of network-based jihadism from that of Osama bin Laden’s pyramidal model. In the absence of testimony by Nemmouche, who was extradited to Belgium and who as of this writing has still refused to say anything, the precise reasons for his presence in Marseille with the aforementioned deadly equipment, and for why he claimed responsibility for the Brussels attack by filming himself in front of an ISIS flag (as Amedy Coulibaly was soon to do on January 8, 2015, in anticipation of the hostage-taking and killing at the Parisian Hyper Cacher grocer the next day), remain unknown. But the connection between the two lands of jihad—the West’s soft underbelly of Europe and the Syria of ISIS—between which a continuous back-and-forth flow of jihadists had been established, found in Nemmouche its first spectacular incarnation and its paradigm.
In the wake of Nemmouche’s arrest, conspiracy theorists claimed, as they had after September 11 and the Merah affair, that the clumsy jihadist was in fact a provocateur manipulated by the French and Israeli secret services in order to “soil the image of Islam” and feed “Islamophobia”—a claim many Internet users found convincing. ISIS, for its part, resisted these conspiracy theories because they devalued the “heroes and martyrs of the jihad,” whose praises it sang in its online magazine Dabiq as part of its ongoing campaign to maintain the flow of recruits into its ranks.
“OH, MY BROTHERS IN ALLAH FROM FRANCE!”
In July 2013, while Nemmouche had joined ISIS in Syria and was mistreating the prisoners he was guarding, a video in French was posted by this jihadist group, which was still, a year before its conquest of Mosul and the proclamation of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s “caliphate,” only one of the factions vying for the dominant spot in the Islamic resistance to Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Whereas its rivals in the al-Qaeda–affiliate al-Nusra Front seemed to be dominant and had many French nationals in its ranks (including the recruiter Omar Omsen, discussed in the previous chapter), ISIS’s new video testified to its own international influence and, for the first time, expressed clearly the interpenetration of the Syrian and French battlefields.
This ISIS video featured two half-brothers from Toulouse, Nicolas and Jean-Daniel Bons. The elder of the two had converted to Islam at the same Bellefontaine mosque in the banlieue projects of Le Mirail in the southwest of Toulouse that Mohamed Merah was fond of frequenting. The main place of worship in the neighborhood, it is located next to a supermarket whose parking lot it takes over on Fridays when as many as three thousand persons converge there for services. Although its imam, Mamadou Daffé, a charismatic director of research in biology at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS, or National Center for Scientific Research), advocates an all-encompassing form of Islam, he does not define himself as a Salafist. And yet the stalls in the parking lot that distribute Islamic literature during the main prayer service offer the faithful only Salafist texts in both Arabic and French.
The elder of the Bons brothers, Nicolas, also known as Abu Abdel Rahman (his Islamic alias is one of Allah’s ninety-nine names and means “father of the servant of the All-Merciful”), was brought up by his mother, a non-commissioned officer in the army who divorced shortly after his birth. He lived in a lower-middle-class environment, both in the cities where his mother was garrisoned and in a subdivision in a quiet town on the outskirts of Toulouse. However, this protected childhood, punctuated by sojourns in Guyana with his father and his half-brother Jean-Daniel, did not enable him to find a stable occupation, because his grades in school were not good enough. Seeking an identity, he converted to Islam in 2009 through contact with North African friends in Toulouse, where, as we have seen in the last chapter’s discussion of the “white sheikh” Abdulillah (Olivier Corel), Islamic proselytizing was particularly common. Jean-Daniel Bons returned to Toulouse to live with their common grandmother and also converted under the influence of his elder brother shortly before they both flew to Syria via Spain in March 2013—after telling their friends and relatives that they were leaving for a vacation in Thailand.
In the aforementioned French-language video broadcast by ISIS, Nicolas/Abu Abdel Rahman Bons wears a red-and-white checkered keffiyeh knotted at the nape of his neck. His trimmed beard is almost blond, and there is a strange light in his eyes: he looks ecstatic. He appears alone in the first part of the video, where he expresses himself in the following terms against a black background and under a flag marked with the seal of the Prophet:
I am your brother in Allah, Abu Abdel Rahman, I am French, of a French father and a French mother, and, uh, my parents are atheists, they have no religion, and, Hamdulillah [“Allah be praised”], Allah guided me, I converted to Islam almost three years ago, Hamdulillah! So the goal of this video, my brothers, is to invite you and encourage you to join us in the land that Allah has blessed, the country of Sham [the Levant]!
Oh! my brothers from France, my brothers in Allah from France, from Europe, from the whole world, in sha’ Allah (“Allah willing”), jihad in Syria, it is obligatory, the jihad in Syria, it is ob-lig-a-tory! As the Prophet, Salallah ‘aleihi wa sallam [“peace be upon him,” a eulogistic phrase attached to the name of the Prophet Muhammad in Islam] said, the Ummah [community of believers] is like a single body: as soon as one part suffers, all the others come to its aid, so we are obliged to come to the aid of our brothers, our brothers who are in a very difficult situation. And we are also obliged to work for the restoration of a Khalifah [caliph] so that Allah’s word may be the highest. And those who do not work for that are unfortunately in sin, they are in sin!
There are many Muslims on Earth, and we need you, in sha’ Allah! Where are the men? Where are the men? Where are the men of the community of Muhammad, Salallah ‘aleihi wa sallam? What will you say, what will you say to Allah when you are before Him and when the witnesses who come before you will be women who have been raped, children who have been killed, brothers who have been tortured in the prisons of these dogs?
In conclusion, I would like to send M. François Hollande a message: “Hey, François Hollande, convert to Islam, save your soul from the fires of Hell and disavow yourself of [désavoue-toi de] your Jewish and American allies! Withdraw the troops from Mali, stop fighting Muslims, stop fighting Islam! You want to fight Allah? But Allah is the greatest, He is the greatest, Allah, and you are [all] very tiny!”
Declaimed in a slow and monotonous voice, this exhortation appears to be the recitation of a text held below and to the right of the screen that Nicolas/Abu Abdel Rahman struggles to read, sometimes stumbling over the words and looking at the camera lens only in moments of dramatic inflection, as when he addresses the president of the French Republic. This metatext, of which he does not seem to be wholly the author, as his hesitating delivery suggests, is written in a hybrid style. It consists of bombastic adaptations of ready-made Arabic formulas, reinforced by expressions of gratitude to Allah laboriously uttered in the language of the Prophet. The bits of subtitling in Arabic, partly hidden by another, more succinct subtitling into English, suggest that the text was initially conceived in Arabic and then translated into French to be read.
This Salafist gibberish, Orwellian Newspeak of the Islamic era, is the vector par excellence of jihadist indoctrination, thanks to the mental formatting through which it conditions neophytes. It is structured around strange-sounding phrases like “so that Allah’s word may be the highest”—a word-for-word translation of an Arabic invocation. More surprising is the incorrect transitive indirect construction of the verb se désavouer de (literally “to disavow oneself of”)—which, moreover, is seldom used in its reflexive form—when François Hollande is exhorted to convert (calling on the leader of enemies to convert before combat has been obligatory in jihadist literature since the dawn of Islam). In reality, the expression désavoue-toi de tes alliés juifs et américains (literally “disavow yourself of your Jewish and American allies”) is a locution that makes sense only in the Salafist rhetoric translated here. It refers to the doctrine of “alliance and disavowal” (al wala’ wal bara’a), which requires of Muslims absolute submission to Islam in its most literalist understanding and a complete break with the non-Islamic environment, all of which is described as “disbelief” (mécréance).
This doctrine, which is found in classical Islamic thought in the works of the most radical authors, calls upon pious Muslims to close ranks and engage in an uncompromising battle against all their enemies, whether they are infidels, heretics, or apostates. The phrase se désavouer de (disavow oneself from) expressing this break is commonplace on francophone jihadist sites. We have already encountered it quoted in Salim Benghalem’s exhortation, and it is found several times in the interviews conducted in 2013–2014 by the journalist David Thomson and reproduced in his pioneering inquiry, Les Français jihadistes.6 It is used by one of Thomson’s interlocutors, Yassine, a young Frenchman of Moroccan origin born and raised in Seine-Saint-Denis, to explain that the “fighting sheikhs of Syria” whose videos he watches on YouTube are “the most credible”:
They are more centered on jihad, on Tawhid [the uniqueness of Allah], on Alliance and Disavowal, which are the basis of our religion. Know who to ally yourself with and who to disavow yourself from. Know who your allies are and who your enemies are.
In his ISIS video broadcast, Nicolas/Abu Abdel Rahman juxtaposes these formulas, translated and taken mechanically from Arabic, with the relaxed style of popular spoken language, systematically repeating the subject of the sentences (“jihad in Syria, it is obligatory,” “He is the greatest, Allah”). An unintentionally comic effect is produced when he addresses François Hollande: the president’s name is preceded by the expletive “Ho” (hey), probably reflecting the vocative ya, whose use in Arabic is required. This is not the case in French, but in southern France, the expression is used among intimates. “Ho, François Hollande,” pronounced with a strong Southwest lower-middle-class accent and followed by the use of the familiar second-person singular tu, is clearly intended to diminish the solemn respect with which the office of the French presidency is normally regarded, in accord with an Islamic tradition that seeks to puncture the pride (istikbar) of the powerful of this world and that insists on humility (istid’af) before Allah. The overall effect of the video is odd, recording via the medium of a jihadist cyberworld the offbeat locutions of a child of the Toulouse banlieues, lost on the Syrian battlefield where he was soon to die like a sacrificial lamb. (In another segment of the video, Nicolas/Abu Abdel Rahman is designated as a future martyr ready to be received into the felicity of Muhammad’s paradise.)
The second part of the video featuring Nicolas/Abu Abdel Rahman shows him in combat uniform, a Kalashnikov strapped on his shoulder, alongside his younger brother Jean-Daniel, who looks like a boy wearing a cap worn backward in the hip-hop fashion, against a background of palm trees. Holding a Quran in his hand, he once again exhorts his “brothers” in Islam to make the hegira, the emigration to the land of Islam, to leave a country which is full of infidels and which attacks jihadists in Mali. He boasts of having carried out da’wa, Islamist proselytization, around him and thus to have received into Islam his brother, a “gift of Allah.”
Nicolas/Abu Abdel Rahman explains that his desire for jihad came to him both from reading a multitude of Quranic verses that call believers to it and from viewing the videos featuring the Sheikh Abdallah Azzam (1941–1989). The mention of Abdallah Azzam is significant. This Palestinian Sunni theologian and activist in the Afghan mujahideen struggle against the Soviets in the 1970s was an ideologue of the first generation of jihadists. Using him in an indoctrination video was a way for ISIS to assert its “respectable” jihadist pedigree in the context of its rivalry with the then dominant al-Qaeda branch in Syria, the al-Nusra Front.
Being a propaganda instrument for asserting ISIS as the only legitimate jihadist entity, the video in its third part features a column of vehicles filled with men brandishing their weapons and ISIS’s black flag, winding down a road typical of the Syrian landscape, among hills planted with olive trees, with a soundtrack of anashid. A banner in Arabic entitles the scene: “The joy of the jihadis at the announcement of the proclamation of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.”
Nicolas/Abu Abdel Rahman’s younger half-brother died in combat during the month following the broadcast of the video in August 2013. Even if he was proud of the sacrifice of his younger brother for the jihad, he admitted that he was very shaken by his death, as his mother revealed in a later interview with this author. He telephoned her regularly, and she suggested that he not make any more propaganda videos. Like many other young Europeans judged to be insufficiently experienced for combat, and to avoid having another mouth to feed, he was finally assigned to a suicide mission—possibly after having been given Captagon, an amphetamine widely administered to ISIS militants that inhibits fear—on which he died on December 22, 2013. On January 7, his mother received a text message informing her of his death the previous month.
On September 30, 2015, almost two years after the event, a new jihadist site, Furat (Euphrates), appeared online featuring a video showing the last moments of Nicolas/Abu Abdel Rahman. Five minutes long and entitled after the Quranic verse “I have hastened unto Thee, my Sustainer, so that Thou might be well-pleased” (20:84), it consists of a montage of the final statements of the future martyr and images of the attack in which he died. Complementing his call for volunteers for jihad in Syria and in France and his exhortation to François Hollande to convert, it provides rare psychological insight into the distress and loneliness of a French youth for whom the conversion to Islam and subsequent departure for “the blessed land of Sham” were a quasi-therapeutic, and fatal, recourse:
I send my greetings to all my mujahideen brothers all over the world. I send a message to all other Muslims: oh! my brothers, hurl yourselves into jihad, Hurl yourselves toward the paths to paradise. Oh! my brothers, I urge you to organize in every country where the governments fight Islam. I urge you to organize to carry out operations, [providing] a good example like what Mohamed Merah did in Toulouse. […]
A message for all the brothers of the dawla [the Islamic State, ISIS]. It is my true family. In France, people’s hearts are closed, there is nothing in their hearts; they are nice at first, and then later there is nothing. Here, truly, people’s hearts are open, there are smiles, all that, compassion, warm reception, truly I love you for Allah, really a lot, you are the best people I’ve ever met, and I thank Allah for having put me here with you.
The disparate profiles of Mehdi Nemmouche and Nicolas/Abu Abdel Rahman Bons illustrate the broad social and ethnic spectrum of the activists ISIS manages to catch in its net. At one extreme, we have the son of Harkis and an ould al h’ram—a “child of sin”—from Roubaix, buffeted by fate from the moment he entered the world, a multiple repeat offender, re-Islamized in prison and trained in Syria to put his “vice” in the service of jihad before his massacre of Jews in Brussels in imitation of Merah. At the other extreme, we have a young man born of a white family and brought up by a divorced mother in a provincial middle-class suburban enclave where opportunities for cultural enrichment and socializing had been replaced by solitary social media consumption in front of screens, tablets, and smartphones.
These at-risk and somewhat lost young people, both searching in different ways for an absolute, were hooked by Salafism online. It offered them, particularly in the atmosphere of intense Islamist proselytism that characterized Toulouse, the warmth of a peer group that ended their loneliness, a preliminary condition for the exaltation of an ideal destined to “change their lives”7 … through involvement in the jihad to destroy Evil and establish the reign of the Good.
These same diverse ingredients were present in the small town of Lunel, located in the département of Hérault in southwestern France. In 2014, some members of the media started calling it the “capital of French jihad” because six men from there had died in Syria—a tenth of all the French jihadists who died that year (the fatalities more than doubled in 2015, and by the time of this writing in 2016, two additional men from Lunel had died there). Moreover, about twenty Lunel residents left for Syria—the exact number is difficult to determine, because unlike the families of converted young people, who immediately report their children’s disappearance to the authorities of a French state with which they identify, some parents of immigrant origin remain silent in order to avoid disapproval or because they regard the infidel state with suspicion, fear, or indifference and do not want to attract its attention.8
Because only about twenty-five thousand people live in Lunel, the proportion of jihadists who left for Syria suddenly became the highest in France in 2014 (the following year, it was overtaken by Trappes, a city of equivalent size in the département of Yvelines, near Paris, whence there were more than eighty departures). In addition to the media hype, which brought dozens of journalists from all over the world to this commune locally known mainly for its Muscat wine, for its bullfights, and, among scholars, for the cultural influence of its medieval Jewish community, the case of Lunel is exemplary of the motifs and processes through which jihadism attracts young French people from various origins.
Located about twenty kilometers from Montpellier and from Nîmes, the region’s two main labor pools, Lunel shared the economic decline of the rest of the wine-producing southwest, of which Béziers offers another striking example. (In 2014 the citizens of Béziers elected as its mayor the far-right politician Robert Ménard, a noted journalist and former founder of “Reporters without Borders,” who received the support of the National Front.) Lunel’s economic decline led to a fall in real estate prices, a deterioration of its downtown, and a subsequent attraction into the area of destitute people with immigrant backgrounds, along with problems of crime and drug dealing. Local politicians and business leaders have responded to these circumstances by attempting to turn the banlieue of Lunel into an affordable bedroom community for Montpellier and Nîmes.
The population of Lunel has tripled over the last thirty years, and a second town, consisting of tracts of residential subdivisions, a few low-cost housing projects surrounded by greenery and industrial zones, and shopping centers amid enormous parking lots, was built alongside the old city, which has retained, in its round shape, the trace of its ancient ramparts. Recent immigrants are among many of the newcomers—12 percent, according to an agency of the French state responsible for the collection and dissemination of economic statistics.9 Taking all nationalities together, the head of the local mosque has estimated that six thousand Muslims live in the city, for about a quarter of the total population. (For his part, the prefect of the region estimates that the population of North African origin represents a quarter to a third of the city total.)
This growing town with a birthrate above the national average nonetheless remains the twelfth-poorest commune in France. It has an unemployment rate of nearly 40 percent for young people from immigrant backgrounds, according to the head of the local youth cultural center (the Maison des jeunes et de la culture, or MJC), who has long served as their contact person and who himself comes from their ranks.
Lunel’s unemployment situation affects not only the low-cost housing projects and the crumbling downtown area but also the residential area subdivisions. Residents’ limited prospects for social mobility have led to disillusionment and the sort of deprivation that sociologists since Tocqueville have seen as one of the chief sources of protest movements.
Culturally, Lunel is caught in a vise. The nearby Montpellier metropolitan area, energized by the economic development initiatives of its former mayor, Georges Frêche, has drained the rest of the département of Hérault, and even the whole surrounding region of Languedoc, of its economic vitality. Lunel’s educated classes—not only long-standing residents but also the children of immigrants who have completed their education—take advantage of the good train connections with Montpellier to move there. Having left Algeria along with many pieds-noirs in the wake of independence, North African immigrants, of whom today’s chibanis (elders in Arabic) are the survivors, work in wine grape growing and market gardening. At first, they were migrant workers, but then they settled down and brought their wives, with whom they had children born on French soil.
Starting in the 1970s, Moroccans supplanted Algerians in the world of French agriculture. In the course of that decade, a large number of immigrants from Tiflet, a small Berber town not far from Rabat, began to settle in Lunel. Tiflet, known locally for its souk and its pétanque bowling tournaments as well as its cultural isolation and poverty, was also the site of a police roundup that took place in May 2012, revealing the presence of arms caches belonging to an Islamo-terrorist network. (Since 2010 Tiflet has had a high-security prison in which about fifty jihadists are incarcerated, including some convicted in connection with attacks in Casablanca on May 16, 2003.)
By the first decade of this century, Lunel’s old city center had fallen into decay. Over the years, the lack of maintenance resulted in more and more housing becoming unfit for human habitation. Shopkeepers deserted the core area for urban development zones on the outskirts of town and were replaced by indigent people from immigrant—largely Moroccan—backgrounds. The increase in crime, particularly burglaries and traffic in hashish from Morocco, was one of the main reasons for the defeat of the left and the election, in 2001, of the right-wing mayor Claude Arnaud, who began his third term in 2014. Arnaud significantly increased the number of municipal police officers and then tried to find interlocutors in the immigrant population in an attempt to end social conflict and restore public tranquility. Noting the divisions and rivalries between this community’s different components, of which the local Harkis’ vote for the far right was a sign, he concluded that the mosque was the most unifying authority.
In 1987, a Muslim place of worship was established in a dilapidated building on a Lunel street near the mayor’s office. The association that managed it was a wing of Jama’at al-Tabligh (the Society for the Propagation of the Faith), an Islamic pietist movement that was particularly active in the 1980s, when it played an important role in the battle against drug addiction among young immigrants. It was, moreover, identified as such by some French municipalities that found themselves helpless to deal with a problem that was affecting groups with which they had no connection. In Lunel, Tabligh’s followers approached drug users who were shooting up in the Jean-Hugo park, in the city center, and tried to get them to stop using drugs by encouraging them to embrace a strict Muslim identity that would provide structure to their lives.10
Founded in India in 1927, Tabligh initially sought to preserve the Islamic identity of the politically vulnerable Muslim minority in the Hindu-dominated subcontinent. Worried about the adulteration of the faith in contact with a massively non-Muslim environment and without the coercive power of the state behind it, Tabligh engaged in itinerant preaching to “revive Islam in the hearts of the faithful.”
Combining Sufi spirituality with the scriptural religion of the learned, Tabligh is known for its unceasing efforts to locate and save “lost” Muslims (and also, for the past half-century, for its proselytizing of non-Muslims). This mission work is a powerful socializing device in that the group’s norms and values can be interiorized only in the framework of a community of religious faith and practice that serves to guide each act in everyday life. The movement likes to quote an Arab proverb according to which “the wolf [the incarnation of Evil] eats only the lamb he finds all alone.”
Tabligh’s missionizing field trips missions last from a single weekend to forty days or longer and are conducted by teams composed of both neophytes and confirmed sect members who are led by an “emir.” Carried out on foot as much as possible, they allow the movement to literally “enmesh” the whole world. Today, Tabligh is the Islamic network that has the most followers worldwide, and its annual meetings at its headquarters in Raiwind, Pakistan, not far from Lahore, attract millions of people. In France from the 1970s on, it has played the leading role in the Islamization of Muslim immigrants and their children and has provided religious supervision for most of the main prayer centers.
This is the case in Lunel, where a new and bigger mosque was built on the outskirts of town between 2006 and 2010. Situated on a large tract of land in an industrial zone surrounded by parking lots, at the traffic circle named after Charles de Gaulle’s famous appeal to the French nation of June 18, 1940,11 and next to an equipment rental business and a Quick fast-food restaurant, the el-Baraka (Divine Blessing) mosque was inaugurated with great ceremony and in the presence of the mayor in late October 2010. It had been financed, according to some of those responsible for it, by contributions made by area Muslims, and it benefited by the volunteer work provided by members of the community in the construction industry.
The spacious new mosque could accommodate worshipers without causing the crowding and traffic congestion problems associated with the previous house of worship in the town center. But while the increased space solved one problem, it created another for the mosque’s board of directors, which was ill equipped to supervise a large place of worship that attracted people from all over the region and that provided opportunities for proselytism by radical elements.
The growth of the local Muslim population in Lunel went in tandem with increased polarization between two communities that spoke little to each other. On the one side, the local immigrant Muslims were becoming increasingly identified with Islamist orthodoxy. On the other side, local non-Muslim residents responded by reasserting a regional identity as Pescalunes (“moon fishermen,” in the local dialect), a name associated with an ancient poetic legend about a Lunel fisherman who tried to fish for the moon with a broken net.
The Pescalune identity is also associated with the culture of bullfighting that has been part of life in the adjacent Rhone delta region of Camargue for centuries. Advertisements for the annual mid-July Pescalune Festival celebrate the pleasures of both bouvine, or Camargue-style bullfighting, and Muscat, a regional sweet wine. This annual celebration of animal and alcohol is anathema to “total” Islam, which regards such a festival as impious and pagan.
On one side of the physical and mental barrier between the two Lunels, in the heart of the medieval city, there is a shop for aficionados of Camargue-style bullfighting. It sells rosettes, tassels, and strings—all of which are attached to the forehead of the bull and which the raséteurs (the local-style toreros) have to try to pull off, using trickery to avoid being gored. The show takes place in the nearby arena, and the crowd mostly includes Pescalunes and tourists (even though the majority of the most famous raséteurs are now young North Africans).
On the other side, a stone’s throw away, an Islamic dress shop sells veils, hijabs and niqabs, and concealing gloves for women of all ages. Socioreligious pressure has made the wearing of the veil by women from Muslim immigrant backgrounds ubiquitous. This shop is located on rue Sadi-Carnot, a street named after a French president assassinated by an anarchist in 1894. The street name is sometimes pronounced “Sidi Carnot”12 by some of the recent immigrants, a pronunciation taken up ironically by locals unhappy with their presence.
This same street leads to the Place des Caladons, the arcades of which date back to the thirteenth century and are ornamented with the cross of the Templars, a symbol of a Christian order that played a major role in the Crusades. This square marks the border with the Muslim neighborhood. When entering the main square of the Place des Caladons, one finds oneself staring down the barrel of a pistol brandished by a bronze figure on a pedestal. It is the statue of Lunel’s native son, Captain Charles Ménard, killed in combat in 1892 at the age of thirty-one during a French attack on the village of Seguela, in modern-day Ivory Coast.13
The bronze statue, a realistic and passionate work by the sculptor Auguste Maillard, a pupil of Bourdelle, presents the young captain a few moments before his death. His colonial helmet has fallen to the ground, at the foot of a cactus; his sword is at his side. In a final but desperate effort, he is pointing his pistol toward an imagined adversary about to kill him. (The statue is positioned such that Ménard’s weapon is pointed toward the present Muslim neighborhood of Lunel. City officials moved it several times in the last century before it found its final site in this symbolic place.) On the base of the statue, there is a bas-relief representing an allegory of “Colonial France”: Marianne, also wearing the colonial helmet, lands on a shore, holding out flowers in one hand and broken chains in the other, an allusion to the abolition of slavery (which at that time of the statue’s erection in the late nineteenth century still existed in the Wassoulou Empire of West Africa).
The first round of voting in the spring 2015 regional elections took place after a spate of national press reports that portrayed Lunel as the “capital of French jihad,” to the dismay of municipal officials and most of its residents. In the canton of Lunel, the candidates of the National Front received the most support: 41.59 percent of the votes (with a voter turnout of 52 percent, the residents of the North African immigrant neighborhoods having largely abstained from voting). The far-right party thus surpassed its score in Lunel in the May 2014 European elections, in which it had finished on top with 37.88 percent.
At the municipal level, however, the National Front has not succeeded in capturing the Lunel mayoralty. Since 2001 Claude Arnaud has led a list of diverse right-wing candidates that have consistently prevailed over the NF, and this despite the NF’s ceaseless efforts to exploit public safety issues for political gain. These issues are not of the far right’s invention. In Lunel, the rate of burglary is 8.32 percent, much higher than the national average of 2.7 percent, and the rate of assault is 7.84 percent. In 2015 a magistrate in Montpellier told the Paris newspaper Libération that “on average, each week a young person from Lunel ends up in prison for burglary, drug-dealing, or repeatedly driving without a license. When the only response is judicial, all this creates a very propitious seedbed for all kinds of extremism.”
Many local residents have pointed to the absence of networks that could promote social contact between the diverse groups in Lunel. The same mayor who inaugurated the mosque in October 2010 closed the local Youth and Culture House in the summer of 2015. The one remaining site where those of different races and ethnicities come together under the aegis of secularism is Louis-Feuillade High School, located near the low-income housing project of Abrivados, where many of those who left for jihad in Syria lived. Run by a dynamic team of instructors, it is one of the rare places in the town where young women from Muslim immigrant backgrounds do not wear the veil, due to the restrictions imposed by the 2004 law prohibiting the wearing of religious signs in public schools. But there as elsewhere, many Muslim students have stopped eating in the school cafeteria, which is not halal. And when a “philosophical café” was organized to exchange views and lessen social tensions after the jihadist attacks of January 2015, a few students, like those in many other schools, posted the Twitter hashtag #jesuisCoulibaly to their Twitter accounts—a gesture of solidarity with one of the January 2015 jihadist assassins, Amedy Coulibaly—in response to the popular hashtag #jesuisCharlie.
As we have seen, the form of Islam practiced in Lunel was strongly influenced by the Tabligh movement. But here as elsewhere, the movement’s proclaimed apolitical nature and its willingness to enter into dialogue with the authorities diminished its stature in the eyes of those who wanted to do battle with “disbelief” in the name of a strict and all-encompassing understanding of Islam. Such believers in “total” Islam considered Tabligh’s pietism an unacceptable compromise. Whereas the Muslim Brothers have always found Tabligh useful as a reservoir from which to recruit followers who were already religiously “awakened,” the Salafists are more inclined to see Tabligh as a rival and have set about stigmatizing it in their online sermons. Certain well-known Saudi Salafist scholars issued online fatwas condemning Tabligh’s followers to Hell in the beyond and to death in this world, and the movement’s reputation suffered as a result, particularly among the younger generation of French Muslims, who have supplemented their education in “infidel” public schools with this form of online instruction.
The impact of Tabligh’s all-encompassing approach to religion on young people and its complicated relationship to jihadism can best be seen in the case of Houssem and his friend Raphaël. Houssem, born in France of a Tunisian family with three sons, was mostly brought up by his pious father, an employee of a security company, after his mother died suddenly when he was very young. It was Tabligh that helped Houssem as an adolescent to overcome this family tragedy and that dissuaded him from the petty crime into which he was sometimes tempted. In Louis-Feuillade High School, he had a friend named Raphaël whose father was of Moroccan Jewish origin. Raphaël lived in the residential area near the school, a stone’s throw from the Abrivados housing project where Houssem resided. Raphaël, impressed by the way Tabligh took care of his friend and going through a phase of doubt as he came of age, embraced Houssem’s consoling Islam in early 2010.
To the stupefaction of Raphaël’s parents—his father is a computer scientist and his mother a psychologist—with whom he lived as a pampered only child in a house in one of the town’s new developments, this athlete and guitarist who loved Led Zeppelin abandoned all the “profane” activities in which he seemed to be flourishing, his studies excepted. Raphaël resumed these after a period during which he assiduously attended the el-Baraka mosque, dedicating himself to his new faith with all the zeal of a neophyte.
In a town where the communities were so separate, the closed life of the local Pescalunes held no attraction for a young man like him, who was casting about for an identity. The Islamic proselytism of the Tabligh movement spoke to him. It brought this foreigner whose Jewish family was originally from Morocco into the Islamic culture of those who had, like him, come from North Africa.
Raphaël slowly gravitated toward jihadism over a four-year period by getting involved with a series of Islamic “humanitarian organizations” that encouraged him to volunteer abroad and fight for the cause of the Islamic State. At first raising funds to dig wells in the Sahel, he later joined a more militant group, the Wake Up Project, which fronted the money he needed to travel to Syria. (He reimbursed the group via his PayPal account.) On July 9, 2014, about ten days after ISIS’s proclamation of the caliphate in Mosul, Iraq, he was invited by an older Islamist serving as his “guru” to read an ISIS communique in French translation (Raphaël did not read Arabic, despite his efforts at the mosque). It was a message justifying the Syrian jihad from the spokesman for the new “Islamic State,” Sheikh Abu Mohamed al-Adnani, the nom de guerre of the Syrian Taha Subhi Falaha, born around 1978 and a veteran of the jihad in Iraq since 2003. Raphaël, replying to his guru’s e-mail, included the following laudatory commentary:
Now that the caliphate has been established and that sharia is applied, there reigns a stability like that in the city of Raqqa where the brothers live who have left and whom we know [here he refers to his friend and mentor in Islam, Houssem and, more generally, to the first group of young people from Lunel who left for Syria]. In this city, the brothers and sisters can study. Some people have emigrated to obey Allah Wa ta’âla [the Highest—the transcription of the Arabic is faulty] and benefit the community by their knowledge, their scientific or religious knowledge. The state pays each resident a share, which means that no one is harmed and that they do not experience poverty. People don’t ask: “But what if I have three or four children, how can I feed them?” Or say “I can’t find work and no one wants to give me any because my name is Abdallah.” The shops are closed all day on Fridays. The sale of tobacco, alcohol, and any form of illicit substance has been forbidden and destroyed.
This utopian description of a radiant Islamic life under ISIS clearly assumes that all problems of unemployment and discrimination faced by the young Muslims of Lunel can be resolved in a majority Muslim land that strictly applies Islamic religious law. It was Raphaël’s last written testimony and was striking evidence of the extent of the young man’s indoctrination.
After a final interview with his guru on July 21, 2014, Raphaël flew from Barcelona to Istanbul in the company of Sabri, Houssem’s younger brother. (Houssem had left for the jihad a year earlier with his wife, Maeva, also a recent convert.) They were headed for the Syrian border, where another boy from Lunel was waiting to take them into the “caliphate.” It was only after he arrived in Turkey that Raphaël notified his mother, reassuring her that the motives for his emigration were strictly humanitarian. Raphaël, Houssem, and Houssem’s brother Sabri all were killed in the ranks of ISIS during a bombardment near the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor in October 2014.
Raphaël’s fate was especially perplexing in that his father’s religion was Judaism, whereas the milieu into which he was gradually drawn was drenched in hatred of Israel and in many cases marked by a visceral anti-Semitism. And it was particularly ironic that his fate unfolded in Lunel, a town once nicknamed “Little Jerusalem” because of its importance in medieval times as a center for Jewish philosophy. It was in Lunel that Samuel ibn Tibbon translated Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed from Arabic into Hebrew in the early thirteenth century. Scion of a family that had come from Andalusia to Lunel two centuries earlier, and perhaps the best Arabist in the territory that was to become France, Ibn Tibbon made possible the entrance of the first great Jewish philosophical work into European culture. (Later translated from its Hebrew version into Latin, the Guide became famous for a rationalism that is still controversial and even condemned by the most orthodox rabbis, who remain as attached to the letter of the sacred Jewish scriptures as are the Salafists in the Muslim tradition.)
The Tabligh movement has not been the only Islamist group present in Lunel and in the triangle that that town forms with Montpellier and Nîmes. Other Islamist organizations have contributed to the establishment of a milieu favorable to ISIS. In addition to the emigrant branches of most of the Moroccan Islamist movements—nationals and natives of Morocco constitute the majority of North Africans between the Petit-Rhône River and the Atlantic coast—the Montpellier area has also received activists of the Algerian GIA who took refuge there after their defeat in the civil war of the 1990s. These groups have extended their networks into mosques where supervision is lax. The great mosque of Lunel, inaugurated (as we have seen) at the end of October 2010, a few months after Raphaël’s conversion, has been an ideal venue for proselytizing. Although Tabligh remains influential there, the size of the buildings and the crowds of worshipers make monitoring difficult. As in the “Stalingrad” mosque in Paris, in which Farid Benyettou recruited the future followers of the “Buttes-Chaumont park gang” a few years earlier, more militant conceptions of the faith made themselves heard in Lunel—if not from the imam’s pulpit, then throughout the prayer facility, where groups gather before and after prayer around preachers/recruiters.
In Lunel as elsewhere, “Islamophobia” has become a convenient label for all perceived discrimination. In a social context in which many young Muslims with college degrees seeking work have considered themselves at a disadvantage relative to their “Gallic” counterparts with similar qualifications, Islamophobia has served as a convenient explanation, providing both an outlet for frustration and a cause. “I did a BTS [a two-year degree from a technical college] in accounting, and when we finished, all the native French people found jobs and the only two Arabs in the class did not,” Hamza, Houssem and Sabri’s elder brother, told investigators after he was arrested on January 27, 2015, on suspicion of having organized the networks for going to Syria, and then indicted for “associating with criminals planning terrorist activity.”
The Islamophobia mantra and the victim mentality it reinforces makes it possible to rationalize a total rejection of France and a commitment to jihad by making a connection between unemployment, discrimination, and French republican values. The emphasis on Islamophobia also serves to rule out of bounds all critical reflection on Islam and to excuse any enterprise undertaken in its name, including the form of Islamic humanitarian activity that eventually led Raphael and many other young people to armed jihad. In this sense, Islamists use the term “Islamophobia” in the same way that right-wing Zionists attempt to use the term “anti-Semitism” to prohibit any criticism of the Israeli government and its treatment of the Palestinian people under its military rule.
This sort of reasoning was expressed bluntly in the remarks made by Lahoucine Goumri, president of the Lunel mosque’s association. He had been strongly urged by the mayor, who was worried about his town’s reputation, to make a statement about the departure of twenty young Lunel residents for Syria and the death of six of them. (One of those killed had been the son of the former president of the mosque.) The mayor, who had inaugurated the mosque four years earlier as a symbol of peaceful coexistence, now had to face the concerns of voters as support for the National Front in Lunel increased from 37 percent to 41 percent between the 2014 European elections and the 2015 municipal elections.
Goumri’s much-awaited statement sent a shock wave through the town. The mosque president, who had long participated in the missionary outreach organized by Tabligh, had in recent years distanced himself from the movement’s traditional inclination to seek out compromises with governments. Goumri was less interested in joining with Mayor Claude Arnaud to reduce social conflicts and cleavages than in maintaining a tight solidarity with members of his own religious community—an orientation undoubtedly shared by others in the mosque. Moreover, his statement was marked by the kind of argumentation that is characteristic of the “Islamophobia blame game.”
Lahoucine Goumri’s statement, made on December 13, 2014, three weeks before the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Casher attacks in Paris, began with a response to an invitation to comment about why so many of the local youths who had left for the Syrian jihad had been regulars at his mosque. Goumri remarked that
the mosque has nothing to do with all these departures. They are individual departures. They never connected with the imam or the mosque. The Muslims who come to the mosque are from Lunel, and there is no problem in Lunel. There is a problem 6,000 kilometers from here, and we don’t want to bring it back here to Lunel.
The imam of the Bellefontaine mosque in Le Mirail, where Mohamed Merah and most of the local jihadists were regulars, Mamadou Daffé, told the same story. This sort of response to the authorities’ insistent demand that mosque leaders denounce the participation of congregants in violent jihad reveals the extent of the gap between these congregations and a broader society in which there is a general consensus that jihadism is equivalent to terrorism. Once again, Goumri:
It’s their choice. It’s not for me to judge them. Only God will judge them. If we have to condemn something, we have to condemn that which is condemnable. Why condemn these young people who left in the name of an injustice in Syria and not the French people who left and who killed Palestinian babies with Tsahal [the Israeli army] last summer? Why would a mosque condemn, while other religions do not? […] I don’t see why I should issue a statement if ten persons left out of six thousand Muslims, or 0.04 percent [in reality, 1.7 percent if we use his estimates, and double that if we consider the most likely number of actual departures]? The other young people are not leaving. Why should I speak to the young? Not all the Lunel residents are involved in the Syrian madness.
From the outset, the president of the mosque refused to issue the condemnation that the authorities expected from him. He could not be counted on to associate his former congregants turned jihadis with terrorism in order to dissuade their co-religionists from emulating them. He would not do this, neither in his own name nor in the name of Islam—a persuasive register to which France’s secular institutions and elected officials cannot resort. He thought it “their choice” and understood that they believed they could repair an “injustice”—namely, the repression being conducted by Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
At this point in his statement, having produced the scandalous effect he sought (which elicited vehement reactions that led him to make a half-hearted recantation in a communiqué that appeared the following day), Goumri first elaborated a comparison between Muslims and Jews. Nothing forced him to denounce the young people who had enrolled in the jihad (provided that they were blameworthy) insofar as no one was asking Jewish institutions to condemn French Jews who joined the Israeli army in the summer of 2014, and all the more because they could not claim to be righting an “injustice,” since they went “to kill Palestinian babies.”
Here we have reached the heart of an Islamist line of argument that pitches Islamophobia against anti-Semitism and that challenges, mezza voce, the “double standard” that benefits Jews and disadvantages Muslims. This kind of reasoning is very common not only in the Muslim milieu but also among North African immigrants in general and, beyond them, in a part of French society in which, as we shall see in the following chapter, sympathies with one side or the other in the Israel-Palestine conflict divide public opinion into two approximately equal parts.
The second part of Goumri’s argument stems from his observation that only a tiny proportion of the Muslim residents of Lunel have left for Syria and thus the mosque need not make a public statement, lest that amount to casting suspicion on all Muslims because of the actions of a very few. This “refusal to be lumped together” is a common Islamist response to this situation, as is the resort to statistics that tends to minimize the phenomenon—despite the fact that six congregants from the el-Baraka mosque had already died on the jihad battlefield.
In support of his refusal to condemn those who left for jihad on ethical-religious lines, Lahoucine Goumri evoked Raphaël’s words, before his death, about the happiness of life in Raqqa. He mentioned in particular the situation of the young Maeva, who had converted and become Houssem’s wife and then his widow and the mother of a child born in Syria:
She no longer has any family here. Her parents threw her out when she converted. Over there, she will receive a widow’s pension. Come back? Come back for what? Maybe she doesn’t see how she would live better in France. No doubt her true family is over there, among Muslims.
In conclusion, he suggested that if anyone were to be blamed, it should be the president of the Republic:
The biggest jihadist recruiter is François Hollande! In my opinion, these young people have been pushed to leave ever since March 2011, when François Hollande said that Bashar al-Assad is a butcher and a criminal. These young people left to fight an injustice. They have been bombarded by videos on the Internet. They have seen horrible videos. They have not accepted all that.
Calling the head of state the “biggest jihadist recruiter” aroused indignation and strong official reaction, but this provocation, simultaneously clumsy and too clever, reminded people that the president’s office and the government had indeed early on favored the overthrow of the Syrian regime as a precondition for any solution of the conflict. The government’s early position seemed to be encapsulated by Jean-Pierre Filiu, an ex-diplomat and politically engagé “historian” of the Middle East, who had the ear of President Hollande and his prime minister. Filiu’s article in Le Monde on April 2, 2013, was entitled “Syria is our Spanish Civil War.” Since the government did not follow up its strong rhetorical stance against Assad with any effective political or military action, the young French jihadists may have been encouraged to imagine themselves in a position similar to that of the International Brigades of the 1930s. The jihadists in this analogy rushed into the breach, taking the battle to Assad in the absence of effective French state action just as the brigades had made up for the failure of the French Popular Front government in the late 1930s by going to fight General Franco.
In the weeks that followed Goumri’s remarks, elections were held in the mosque’s managing association that began a long period of internal crisis. The new president, a halal butcher born in Tiflet, appointed as his spokesman a loquacious director of a driving school, the brother of the next-to-last president. That spokesman was forced to resign after he participated, at the invitation of the district’s Member of Parliament, the socialist Patrick Vignal, in a meeting held on February 25, 2015, in the neighboring village of Saint-Just. At this meeting, Vignal, accompanied by the rector of the Muslim Institute of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, and a master of the Languedoc region chapter of the Masonic Grand Lodge of France—wearing his ceremonial apron in a hall where Freemasons had gathered in large numbers—called for brotherhood against terrorism. The hatred of freemasonry is extreme in the Islamist movement, and the pressure of a number of activists on the mosque’s spokesman prevented him from continuing his work.
In March 2015, the Moroccan, non-francophone imam of the Lunel mosque finally decided, in response to many requests, to criticize from the pulpit the departure for jihad in Syria. This earned him death threats from other activists, some of whom had serious criminal records. In an interview with the newspaper Midi libre, one of these activists, speaking in the name of “French Islam,” claimed that the imam’s inability to speak French prevented him from understanding young people who had been born in France and who spoke only French. By the fall of that year, the imam was forced to resign after a stormy assembly meeting of his congregation during which he was accused of treachery with the gaouris (French, literally “non-Muslims”). This left the mosque association without a leader on the occasion of the Eid al-Kebir (Festival of Sacrifice) holiday, September 14, 2015, which took place in a particularly tense atmosphere. In mid-September, the court had handed down heavy sentences to the men who had threatened the imam. The sentences were suspended, but the men were forbidden to frequent the mosque. The imam left for the pilgrimage to Mecca, informing people that he would no longer exercise his ministry. He was replaced by an interim imam, also from Morocco, who held the position while shuttling back and forth between the two countries.
In 2015, Lunel was largely supplanted as the main French takeoff point for the Syrian jihad by the Parisian banlieue of Trappes, which had a comparable population but four times as many departures. Despite having lost this dubious honor, Lunel remains a useful case for understanding the genesis of contemporary French jihad.
THE ESCHATOLOGY OF JIHAD AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR
On March 26, 2011, in the first days of the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, an eighteen-page booklet appeared online that had been written by Husayn ibn Mahmud, a Salafist sheikh who was famous in the “jihadosphere.” Translated into rather good French under the title “Damas, la base du djihad sur terre” (“Damascus, the Base of Jihad on Earth”), it was posted online by the main francophone Salafist jihadist site Ansar-alhaqq (The Companions of the Truth) and was still accessible at the time of this writing.
The text gathers together narratives and advice for the departure to Syria and is part of a body of propagandistic prose that is now of considerable size and generally rendered from the Arabic by young, educated amateur translators. The level of written French on Salafist sites has noticeably improved in the course of a decade, thanks to the increasing numbers of motivated converts who have learned the Prophet’s language by passing through the madrasas of Egypt and Yemen, as well as to the young bilingual college-educated North Africans who have gotten involved in francophone jihad.
Romain Letellier, an unemployed young man of twenty-six from Normandy who lives on welfare, is the aforementioned Salafist website’s chief moderator. Born into an atheistic communist family, he converted at the age of twenty and henceforth called himself Abu Siyad al-Normandy. He was arrested in September 2013 and six months later was sentenced to a year in prison for “justifying acts of terrorism” and “provoking the commission of terrorist acts.” He was accused of having posted on Ansar-alhaqq a translation of two issues of the anglophone online magazine Inspire, founded in July 2010 by the American-Yemeni jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki. Articles in these magazines called for “bloodying the heads of unbelief” and justified the “marvelous operation at the Boston Marathon” on April 15, 2013. With its three dead and 254 wounded, it was described as a “perfect example of investment at low cost” in line with the modus operandi of third-generation network-based jihadism.
According to the court, Ansar-alhaqq, which appears in most of the files on “self-radicalization,” has more than four thousand subscribers who have exchanged a hundred thousand messages. It was through this efficient channel that Ibn Mahmud’s writings reached francophone jihadists on the Web, providing them with arguments for dropping everything and joining the jihad in Syria—arguments that were presented as both irrefutable with regard to Islam’s sacred texts and politically rational. Part of this text consists of a collection of the Prophet’s hadiths extolling the “country of Sham” from an eschatological perspective. The latter is carried through jihad and ends up, beyond martyrdom, at the Hour of the end of time and the triumph of Islam on Earth. The second part concentrates its attacks on the impiety of the syncretic Alawite religious sect in Syria and calls for its extermination.
In the Islamic tradition, the mystique of Sham covers a vast spectrum whose usual French or English translation, “Levant,” does not render its whole semantic and symbolic amplitude. In the ancient cosmography of Islam, organized along an east-west axis of which Mecca is the center, Sham, or “Greater Syria,” designates the left or north (shamal), and Yemen designates the right or south (yamin). It is this sacred geography, and not the modern cleavage between Orient and Occident, that provides the Salafists’ orthonormal reference points. For those who excitedly discover this cosmology on the Internet, be they recent converts or Muslims by birth who have been initiated into Islamist doctrine and who are eager for jihadist action, Sham presents a matchless attraction as the site of the decisive battle that will allow the universal triumph of Islam on Earth.
The departure for Syria to engage in jihad and undergo martyrdom there is the natural and concrete sequel of their virtual indoctrination. Other privileged destinations, such as Libya, which is after all an important geopolitical and military relay point for jihad against Europe, cannot rival it in terms of messianic expectation. The “Greater Syria” of Sham is the zone that extends from the lonely deserts of Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean and that includes the territories of the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine-Israel, and Jordan. But the Arabic term also designates by metonymy the capital of this enormous symbolic region, the city of Damascus. Although standard written Arabic calls this city Dimashq, from which the French adjective damasquiné (English “damasked”) is derived, together with the English “Damascus,” ancient usage and the local dialect prefer instead the expression “Ash Sham” (“the Sham”). For French Salafist jihadists who have been only superficially Arabized, jihad, in the cities and countrysides from Aleppo to Homs, from Idlib to Raqqa and to Palmyra—where most of them were deployed in summer 2015—will acquire its full meaning only once Damascus has fallen into their hands, triggering the final apocalypse from which will emerge, after endless massacres, the worldwide triumph of Islam.
That is the message of Ibn Mahmud, made accessible through the Ansar-alhaqq forum for French neophyte jihadists, whose knowledge of Islamic history is normally so slight that they are inclined to take literally the quotations the author makes out of context and then to put them in action, making his short treatise a kind of vademecum. Its first six pages consist of a collection of the Prophet’s hadiths. Arranged in a crescendo, they begin by praising the emigration of jihad to Sham and end with the eschatological promises opened up by the fall of Damascus.
A section entitled “The elite of warriors on the surface of the globe” introduces the reader to the sanctification of the battle in Syria by the Prophet himself. The hadith is reported by one of his companions, Abdullah ibn Hawalah, and, as is the custom in the transcription of Islam’s Scriptures, people’s names are followed by Arabic calligraphy (not translated by Ansar-alhaqq) that indicates that their remarks are sacred:
You shall be led to raise armies: an army for Sham, an army for Iraq, then an army for Yemen. Then ‘Abdullah said: “Choose one of them for me, O messenger of Allah!” Then he said: “Go back to Sham. And if anyone is not capable of that, let him go then to Yemen. For Allah the All-Powerful and Majestic has promised me the region of Sham and its people.”
The land of knowledge and faith, Sham is also where the resurrection will take place on Judgment Day. “When the period of troubles comes, Belief will be in Sham,” another hadith explains:
At the end of time a fire shall rise up from Hadramawt [Hadramaut, now in southern Yemen, which was plunged into civil war between Shiites and Sunnis and fell under jihadist control in spring 2015], making all the people of that time unite. The Companions asked: “What do you command us to do, then, at this moment, O Messenger of Allah?” He replied: “Go to Sham.”
A similar situation can only further increase the urgent necessity of beginning the emigration (hegira) to that country, especially since the peoples already there will suffer the wrath of Allah, who will consume them in fire along with monkeys and pigs:
There will be a hegira [emigration] after the Hegira [the Prophet’s original hegira from Mecca to Medina in 622], and the best people all over the world will then be those who will follow the Hegira that was that of Ibrahim (to Sham), and then there will remain on the face of the Earth the worst of its inhabitants, who will be driven out of their own lands.
The first part of the pamphlet ends with a reminder of the scenario of the end of time and the advent of the Hour, which will take place in Sham. The battle will begin in Dabiq, where the infidel armies and the Muslim armies will confront one another. In the Islamic Scriptures, these impious armies of Byzantium are those called “Roman,” or roum, referring to the Roman Empire of the Orient, or designated by the metaphor banou asfar (sons of blonds), two terms that facilitate the identification of “infidels” with contemporary Europeans and Westerners.
A modest town now located between Aleppo and the border between Turkey and Syria, without any particular strategic importance, Dabiq fell under the control of ISIS in summer 2014, at the price of a large number of casualties in its own ranks, for the sole purpose of making sacred geography coincide with the battlefront. (ISIS would lose Dabiq to a coalition of Syrian rebels and Turkish special forces in October 2016.) The power of this symbol is recalled by the title Dabiq given to the English version of the ISIS “caliphate’s” online magazine in summer 2014:
The final hour will not come before the Romans have taken up positions at al-A’maq [a neighboring village] or in Dabiq. At that time an army composed of the elite fighters of the world will appear from Medina [to counterattack them]. […] And the last third of the army shall be victorious; they shall not be further tested and they shall be the conquerors of Constantinople.
In Salafist thought, the conquest of Constantinople represents an ineluctable defeat of the West. According to al-Qaeda, the “blessed double raid” of September 11 was a continuation of the countless raids launched by Muslims against the capital of the Byzantine Empire until its final fall in 1453. In Ibn Mahmud’s predictive narrative of the Syrian jihad, the terrestrial conquest undergirds an apocalyptic narrative.
It is in fact in Damascus that the “great massacre” that announces the Hour will be situated:
The city of the Muslims on the day of the great confrontation [al-Malhamah] is located in a fertile oasis near a city called Damascus. On that day it will be the best of all places for Muslims.
This oasis, the Ghouta, was occupied by the rebels very early in the Syrian civil war, and in summer 2013, it was where the Assad government used chemical weapons to try to dislodge them. In 2015, it was ISIS’s front-line position facing the capital, which was still held by the government forces and their Iranian and Shiite allies. From this point of view, the fall of Damascus would be seen in apocalyptic terms, Bashar al-Assad representing the Dajjal, the Islamic equivalent of the Antichrist, whose defeat will allow for the coming of the Hour:
[The Dajjal] will emerge at the very moment that the Muslim troops form their ranks for combat. In all truth the hour of prayer will come, and it is at that moment that ‘Issa ibnu Maryam ‘Alayhi salâm [Jesus son of Mary, may peace be on him] will descend to lead their prayer. On seeing him, the enemy of Allah will begin to melt away like salt in water. If ‘Issa ibnu Maryam ‘Alayhi salâm left him [the enemy] that way he would be dissolved until dead, but Allah will make him perish at the hands of His messenger, who, after having killed him, will expose his blood to all, from the point of his lance.
The second part of the treatise returns to the present issues. If the people of Sham no longer benefit from Allah’s bounties, that is because they have abandoned the path of jihad in favor of secular ideologies such as nationalism or Ba’athism. God has imposed on them “the worst elements of His creation: freemasons, Jews, and Christians. And the much hoped-for grandeur shall not return so long as the eternal banner of Islam is not yet held aloft.” But the cause of all ills is the domination of the Alawite sect over the land of Sham.14 After having adopted the Islamic polemical tradition with regard to the Alawites, a tradition notably illustrated by the famous thirteenth-century jurist Ibn Taymiyya, the spiritual father of Salafism and Saudi Wahhabism, Ibn Mahmud recommends the “final solution” against these “apostates more infidel than the Christians and the Jews.”
Such a text explains what in our time the Syrian jihad offers to would-be jihadis based in France and elsewhere in the West, and we find an echo of it in the video made by Nicolas/Abu Abdel Rahman Bons. Ibn Mahmud situates himself in the direct line of a contemporary jihadist literature that defers to a canonical tradition with precise and incontestable references. He privileges literal readings and considers any effort at contextualization to be heresy or impiety. Out of a concern for efficiency, he wrote for an audience little versed in Islamic theology a treatise that is simultaneously easy to understand and in which the connection between prophetic injunctions and their execution is made in a didactic mode. As is customary in Salafist thought, his argument is based more on the Prophet’s hadiths than on the Quran itself. In fact, the polysemy of the Quran, which was composed in an allegorical mode, opens the way to numerous interpretations that have maintained, over fifteen centuries of the history of Muslim civilization, a plurality of opinions. Inversely, the hadiths, to which the Salafists accord priority, are richer in explicit injunctions and close the path to interpretations of dogma.
In this respect Ibn Mahmud sheds light on the social crisis with which aspiring French jihadists are confronted and responds to their demand for meaning, of which we have one example in Raphaël’s commentary on the proclamation of the caliphate in Mosul. Its most salient characteristic is the imposition of an intangible, sacrosanct norm, an indisputable response to the feeling of disorientation among the young people who go over to jihadism, no matter what their social background and ethnic origin. Through its many versions on the Internet and the captious seductions of a cyber-language that borrows from video games, television series, and cult films, this rhetoric produces a self-projection that systematically counters the anomie experienced by his readers in Lunel, as it does in such housing project neighborhoods as Le Mirail in Toulouse, L’Ariane in Nice, and L’Alma-Gare in Roubaix, among so many others. It is the doctrinal outcome of the deconstruction of a fallacious impiety and then of the edification, on dynamited ruins from Palmyra to Nimrod, of the Truth, a parousia of Islam through the Syrian jihad.
For third-generation jihadists and French people fed on Omar Omsen’s 19 HH and comparable grand narratives, the emigration to Syria, elevated into a hegira to Sham, took on a polysemous dimension that fulfilled and federated diverse expectations. It immediately proceeded to carry out a “transvaluation of all values,” to use the Nietzschean expression, which brings individuals uncomfortable in today’s Western societies within a heroic process that leads to their individual redemption as well as the redemption of society. We have seen how the robber Mehdi Nemmouche, the son of a Harki, a “son of sin” and a convict, reversed, thanks to his stay in the land of Sham, all the stigma that had led him to prison.
Engagement in the Syrian jihad ultimately participates in two continuities. One, which is based on scriptural Islam, was abundantly used by Islamist authors to justify Hamas’s suicide attacks against Israel, which are redescribed as “martyrdom operations.” In a fatwa issued in 1996, the sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, the main international figure in the Muslim Brotherhood and the anchor of Al-Jazeera’s flagship program “Sharia and Life,” had exalted these operations as part of the “legitimate terrorism” (al irhab al machrou’) that the Quran indicates in the words of the All-High: “And prepare against them [the infidels] whatever armament and horses on alert you can to terrorize the enemy of Allah and your own” (Surah 8, “Booty,” verse 40). This very well-known verse has become the justification for the all-out “psychological war” being waged by contemporary jihadism. 19 HH’s mash-up provides its overall narrative environment, and Ibn Mahmud’s treatise “Damascus, the Base of Jihad on Earth” represents its contemporary outcome.
Another justification for this jihadist psychological war situates it in two opposite worldviews that come together to challenge the world order dominated by the West. Far-right radicalism sees in it a victorious battle against “Zionism,” while far-left radicalism sees in it a continuation of the “anti-imperialist resistance” of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Two eloquent examples of this occurred at the very moment that Lunel found itself in the spotlight: on the one hand, Marc-Édouard Nabe, an inflammatory polemicist who was a fellow traveler of the “conspiracy theorists” Soral and Dieudonné before renouncing them to become ISIS’s sycophant, and on the other hand, Illich Ramírez Sánchez, universally known under his pseudonym Carlos, the perpetrator of numerous attacks connected with the defense of the Palestinian cause during the 1980s.
In December 2014, the first issue of Patience, a periodical written and edited by Marc-Édouard Nabe, was published. Claiming that he was following in the path of twentieth-century French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline—including even the latter’s anti-Semitic 1937 Bagatelles pour un massacre (“Trifles for a Massacre”)—Nabe, a writer and musician, is the son of the Italian-Greek-Ottoman singer Marcel Zanini (the performer of the 1970 hit “Tu veux ou tu veux pas”) and was also a cartoonist for Hara-Kiri Hebdo (the predecessor of Charlie Hebdo) when he was young. For a time, he was a neighbor of the novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose success he envied. Wanting to be the enfant terrible of a Parisian media-literary world that is supposed to have marginalized him because of his anti-Semitism, he moved closer to Soral’s anti-Zionist movement before sharing in the latter’s implosion. He then promised to write a big book denouncing the compromises that the Dieudosphère and Soral’s Égalité et réconciliation had made with Iran and with Bashar al-Assad’s Syria.
The cover of Patience features a provocative photomontage reproducing the image of the beheading of the American hostage James Foley by the Palestinian-Briton Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, in which the executioner’s head has been replaced by that of the author, while Dieudonné’s face is substituted for that of the hostage, and Soral’s effigy, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, appears in a cartouche. But apart from its contribution to the petty wars recurrent in this extreme-right milieu, this sixty-three-page publication is distinguished by a panegyric to ISIS written in Nabe’s characteristically ornate and vulgar style.
Patience, in which Nabe combines in his usual way abjection, brilliance, attacks on the memory of the dead, and exaltation, testifies in its own way to the bridges built between a Salafism about which the author understands nothing and political causes of all kinds of which he is willing to make himself the spokesman provided they seem to him to oppose a “system” that has failed to recognize his talent. The text is illustrated by about fifty photographs, most of which show scenes of execution and throat-cutting that are almost pornographic in their fascination with graphic violence. They also include some “girlie” photos that Hervé Gourdel (a mountain guide from Nice who was decapitated in Kabylia in September 2014 by local followers of ISIS) published on his website. In so doing, Nabe wanted to mock Gourdel—despite the fact that the latter’s beheading caused great anguish in France.
In December 2014, Houssem’s elder brother, Hamza, a member of the Lunel jihad milieu who would be arrested at the end of the next month, sent Raphaël’s family a JPEG file reproducing the first issue of Patience, from which he had deleted, in accord with Salafism’s requirements, the unfortunate Gourdel’s erotic photos. He was seeking to justify Raphaël’s emigration to the land of Sham and “martyrdom” by borrowing the eloquent words of a “white man” and a non-Muslim whose rhetoric in favor of ISIS was not religious and to which he attributed a power of universal persuasion that went beyond Islamic milieus.
Hamza had marked one passage. In it, Nabe begins by adopting a tone vaguely resembling that of Victor Hugo celebrating the epic of Napoleon’s Great Army, then makes an attempt at sociology in the manner of Pierre Bourdieu:
One cannot imagine the variety of mujahideen, converts or not, natives or immigrants, who constitute this vast army on the march! What mixtures! The caliphate is a pool as rich as the Foreign Legion. Baghdadi gives foreigners $1,000 a month [much less, according to most testimonies], and there are twenty thousand of them: do the math. It’s better than welfare. […] That’s what the media don’t understand: there are idealists and adventurers. No brain-washing on Facebook will provide a satisfying explanation of the impulse that leads these hordes of young people to leave to break the bones of the bad Muslim and his accomplice the Yankee. […] To be unable to understand that at the age of fifteen one can be an idealist is to underestimate youth itself!
What officials and conspis [conspiracy theorists, the Soral-Dieudonné movement] have in common is that they never believe in the sincerity of an act. For system people, the jihadist is necessarily manipulated by terrorists, and for anti-system people, he is also manipulated, but by the Empire [a reference to Alain Soral’s book that designates by this term the Americano-Zionist forces of Evil]. But it’s simple: they have experienced idleness and humiliation in their sinister housing projects, their hopeless schools, their miserable jobs, and they want to escape, thanks to Allah, the sadness of living in a colony: […] the Arabs are still colonized by the French, but this time not in Algeria: in France!
In this short passage, Nabe’s prose (from which we edited out the most obscene parts) is congruent with Raphaël’s idyllic view of life in Raqqa ten days before his fateful trip.
Although ISIS thus found echoes on the far-right end of the political spectrum, it nonetheless also hijacked, as we have seen in the case of the community of Artigat, a certain trend on the far left that sought to “change life” in utopian communes. But these connections are part of a subjective continuity and have been neither theorized nor claimed by the social actors concerned. In the same month, December 2014, shortly before the terrorist attacks in Paris on January 7, 2015, it fell to one of the principal figures of violent Leninist revolutionism to make this filiation explicit. Carlos, captured by the French secret service in Sudan in 1994, sentenced to life imprisonment, and then converted to Islam during his detention in the early years of the twenty-first century, sent me, from the penitentiary in Poissy—a city in the outskirts of Paris where he was serving his time—a seven-page handwrittten manuscript entitled “La guerre psychologique” (“Psychological Warfare”) and dated December 15, two days after the statements made by the president of the mosque in Lunel:
The Palestinian resistance use sacrifice attacks chiefly for their psychological impact on the Zionist invader and his allies. Hijacking airplanes and boats and taking hostages to attract media coverage are high art in psychological warfare that will keep the Palestinian cause in the spotlight, and at the same time fill the coffers of the Fedayeen’s organizations. The jihadists have followed this line of psychological warfare with great success in the media. The decapitations now carried out openly by citizens of countries that are members of NATO, transmitted over the Internet, are a magisterial media coup with immense, unparalleled benefits: the recruitment of mujahideen from all over and an increase in donations from believers throughout the world. Now the imperialist states will be subjected to reprisal attacks within their borders against which they cannot defend themselves, leading them to indiscriminate repression which will multiply the recruitment of volunteers for jihad. Ineluctably, NATO forces will intervene directly on land, where the mujahideen will be waiting to die as they kill the invaders.
Certain passages in this text, which interweaves the leftist and Islamist vocabularies in a symbiosis that its author himself realized by converting to Islam, recall Abu Musab al-Suri’s predictions and the political dynamics he envisaged for third-generation jihadism. It was written less than a month after ISIS broadcast a particularly striking video showing the execution of eighteen Syrian pilots who had been taken prisoner, a scene to which Carlos referred. The execution was carefully staged and carried out by jihadists acting with their faces uncovered.
The dread was especially great in France when it became clear that one of the executioners was none other than Maxime Hauchard, twenty-two, who now called himself Abu Abdallah al-Firansi (“the Frenchman”). He comes from Bosc-Roger-en-Roumois, a dismal village with a population of 3,200 in the département of Eure that is situated between a picturesque Norman bocage and the Sotteville-lès-Rouen industrial zone. A residential project built around an ancient center where a few traditional Norman houses survive has allowed the village’s population to triple in thirty years. Housing mainly employees and supervisors who work in the surrounding factories, it has enormous supermarkets, a bus station, and pizzerias. It reminds one of the residential neighborhoods in Lunel or the suburbs of Toulouse where Raphaël and Nicolas/Abu Abdel Rahman Bons lived. Like the latter, Maxime, a nice young man from a solid family who was known for his kindness and who was always ready to repair mopeds, converted to Islam at the age of seventeen after having assiduously frequented the appropriate Internet sites and viewed the corresponding videos on social media networks.
Disappointed by an initial journey to Mauretania, where the Islam taught did not meet his requirements, and having viewed images of children who had been killed in the bombing by Bashar al-Assad’s air force, he left for Istanbul in the summer of 2013 with a plane ticket for which he paid 170 euros, crossing without difficulty borders fenced with wire mesh and guarded by soldiers. During an interview carried out through Skype in July 2014 by a twenty-four-hour news channel, he stated, from his barracks in Raqqa, that ISIS paid him $30 per month (far from the sums Nabe imagined!) and that he was part of a group of about forty combatants. He also said that he had radicalized himself alone on the Internet, that he was engaging in jihad in order to make Allah’s laws applied on earth, and that he was prepared to accept martyrdom for the cause.
On January 4, 2015, three days before the bloodbath at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, Maxime Hauchard presented himself in a Twitter thread under his real name, using as a photo the famous picture taken from the November 2014 video in which he appears as one of the executioners of the Syrian pilots. He exchanged premonitory tweets with his interlocutors, among them the editors of the newspaper Le Monde:
#MaximeHauchard. I keep informed about the political, economic, and social situation in France the better to prepare the counter-attack […]. The French state must know that the war will not always take place in Muslim countries […]. Thus one day you have to expect that it will be the Islamic army that enters France. And you will have well deserved it.
1 Harki is the term used to describe Muslim Algerians who served as auxiliaries in the French army during the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962. In France the term is also used to refer to all French Muslims of Algerian birth repatriated to France after 1962 and their French-born descendants. Once in France, Harkis were typically ostracized by other Algerian immigrants. Many Harkis unable to leave Algeria for France after the war of independence were slaughtered by pro-independence forces.
2 I pointed this out in my Passion Française (Gallimard, 2014).
3 A djellaba is a long, loose-fitting robe widely worn in North Africa and elsewhere by pious Muslims.
4 Bring in the Accused, a long-running French television series (2000–2017).
5 Nemmouche was also found with an ISIS flag, a video made after the attack taking responsibility for it, and a helmet with a GoPro camera mounted on it—reminiscent of the GoPro camera carried by Mohamed Merah during his killing spree in Toulouse and Montauban two years prior. In the course of his police interrogation after being picked up in Marseille, Nemmouche was reported to have remarked, “it’s a shame that the camera didn’t work.”
6 Éditions Les Arènes, 2014.
7 “Changer la vie”—a motto of the May 1968 movement and its aftermath, a quotation from the French 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud.
8 Since March 2014, a toll-free phone number set up by a social service branch of the French state (the Comité interministériel de prévention de la délinquance, or CIPD) for reporting cases of “radicalization” has received a disproportionate number of calls from the families of converts.
9 INSEE.
10 I noted this phenomenon in my book Les Banlieues de l’Islam (Seuil, 1987), which appeared at the same time as the establishment of the first Muslim place of worship in Lunel.
11 De Gaulle’s call to French resistance against the Nazi occupation, broadcast from London in June 1940, was a landmark moment in the history of French nationalism.
12 In North-African Arabic, “Sidi” is an honorific equivalent to “Sir.”
13 Captain Ménard’s forces were defeated by those led by Samory Touré, one of the leading figures of the resistance to France’s colonial expansion in West Africa and the founder of the Muslim empire of Wassoulou. He is still celebrated as the “Almamy,” a shortened version of the Arabic expression amir al mou’minin (commander of the faithful). The famous reggae singer from Ivory Coast Alpha Blondy dedicated his hit song “Bory Samory” to Touré.
14 Since the coming to power in Syria of Bashar al-Assad’s late father, Hafez al-Assad, in 1970, the Syrian government has been dominated by a political elite composed largely of members of the Alawite sect.