PARIS, SAINT-DENIS, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2015

On Friday, November 13, 2015, a group of killers connected with the Islamic State in Iraq spilled blood in Paris. This massacre came hardly ten months after the tragedies that took place on January 7–9 at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes. In response, the hashtag #jesuisParis (I am Paris) proliferated over social media, just as #jesuisCharlie (I am Charlie) had done at the beginning of the same year, and an immense movement of solidarity arose around the world. Monuments were illuminated with the colors of the French flag, and “The Marseillaise,” remixed, was sung from America to Australia.

In Saint-Denis—a symbolic city that gave its name to a département known as the “93” (after its postal code) that was for centuries the burial place of the French kings, that became the showplace of the French Communist Party, and that is now the capital of French Islam—a failed attack targeted the Stade de France¹ and eighty thousand fans, including President François Hollande, who were watching a friendly soccer match between France and Germany. Three terrorists blew themselves up outside the stadium, killing, besides themselves, only one passerby. Five days later, in a squalid apartment building near the ­Basilica of Saint-Denis where drug dealers and illegal immigrants lived in squats, an armed group was flushed out and neutralized by the police using information provided by the authorities in Rabat, Morocco. The following day saw fingerprint identification of the bullet-riddled corpse belonging to the presumed brains of the attacks—the Belgian-Moroccan Abdelhamid Abaaoud, alias Abu Omar al-Belgiki (“The Belgian”) or al-Soussi (“from Souss,” a Berber area in southern Morocco). Abaaoud, a former hold-up man and ex-convict, the son of one of the prosperous grocers from this region who run hanouts, or retail shops, throughout Europe, had taken up residence in Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, a working-class district in Brussels that has been dubbed the seedbed of French jihad. After spending time in Syria in 2013, he became the gory hero of unbearable videos distributed by ISIS on social media.

Most other killers have been identified as people born and raised in France or in Belgium—the descendants of Algerian or Moroccan immigrants. Some of them had undergone a lightning-fast radicalization. Take, for instance, Bilal Hadfi, age twenty, a compulsive marijuana smoker whose Facebook wall shows him wearing a swimsuit and sipping a cocktail next to a pool as recently as 2014. He was one of those who triggered their explosive vests near the gates of the Stade de France when they were unable to get in. Or consider Hasna Aït Boulahcen, a twenty-six-year-old woman born in Clichy, one of Paris’s immigrant suburbs, who had been placed in foster families after her parents separated when she was very young. Fond of vodka and a regular at discotheques, she was still using makeup and going out just a few months before posting on her Facebook account a photograph of herself wearing a niqab (face veil). She died in the apartment house in Saint-Denis that was raided by the police on November 18.

Samy Amimour was a Kabyle of Algerian origin. His family does not assiduously practice its religion, but its Berber cultural identity is strong, and it is well known in community life in Drancy, Seine-Saint-Denis, where it resides. For over a year, Amimour had been working as a bus driver for the Paris Transport Authority, which had begun recruiting its drivers in immigrant neighborhoods after its buses started being pelted with stones. In this milieu, the influence of “total Islam” (Islam intégral)2 is now very visible and has become the object of polemics. Amimour began frequenting the Salafist mosque of Le Blanc-Mesnil in Quatre-Vingt Treize, then ceased to care about his work, and the police opened a file on him because he showed interest in going to Yemen. He ended up joining the ISIS forces in Syria and was one of the killers at the Bataclan nightclub, playing cat and mouse with his victims before shooting them as impassively as people zap video game avatars.

Two brothers living in Brussels, Brahim and Salah Abdeslam, ran a café in Molenbeek that was closed by the authorities ten days before November 13 because drugs were being sold there. Brahim blew himself up in a restaurant on the boulevard Voltaire, but his brother, who fled to Belgium the day after the attacks, would be arrested in Brussels in March 2016, after a Belgian-French police onslaught on the network hideout, which would in its turn lead to the attacks on the Brussels-Zaventem airport and the Maelbeck subway station.

In addition to these killers, who are pure products of immigrant neighborhoods in France and Belgium and whose families believe in integration and social ascent, we find among the perpetrators of the attacks two individuals who came to France as part of the flow of refugees leaving Syria and Iraq for Europe. Thus we are at the heart of the link that ISIS has constructed between the jihad practiced in the Levant, where extreme violence and bestiality are communicated live over the Internet, and the world of the neglected immigrant banlieues that are seedbeds of the civil and religious wars that terrorist acts aim to provoke.

The “holy raid” (ghazwa), as the massacres of November 13 were called in Arabic versions of the communiqué reproduced earlier, struck Parisians indiscriminately, without respect to the diversity of their origins. The random machine-gunning of sidewalk cafés and restaurants in Paris neighborhoods with large numbers of immigrants or descendants of immigrants and the carnage at the Bataclan both attest to this, as does the systematic use of explosive vests in the manner of the suicide attacks carried out in the Near East. In contrast, the murders in January 2015 and those that Mohamed Merah committed in Toulouse and Montauban in March 2012 specifically targeted Jews, soldiers, and policemen of Muslim descent, who were called “apostates,” as well as journalists stigmatized by the jihadis as “Islamophobes.”

While these attacks are all part of a strategy that aims to foment in Europe, which ISIS’s ideologists see as the West’s soft underbelly, a war of all against all that seeks the implosion of the Old World and the establishment of a “caliphate” on its ruins, the indiscriminate slaughter in November 2015—dubbed “mass attack” in jihadi parlance—indicates a reorientation. This development is a key element in understanding the offensive that the “third-generation” jihad is conducting against the world in general and against Europe and France in particular, as well in understanding the motives of its members.

The effort made in the following pages to put these crimes in perspective leads us to ask whether the young men (and women) who commit them are capable of meeting such a broad challenge. Or, on the contrary, do the November 2015 mass attacks, and those of the same kind that would follow suit in Nice on Bastille Day, July 14, 2016, and in the Berlin Christmas market on December 19, 2016, paradoxically reveal the flaw in a reticular terrorism that delegates their execution to networks of activists, most of whom come from immigrant milieus and who are exceptionally violent but not very sophisticated? We will see how this model differs from the one typical of the preceding generation, which involved careful planning by a central organization and of which al-Qaeda is the incarnation and September 11 the culmination. Are the petty criminals Abaaoud and Abdeslam in Brussels and Paris; the banlieue gangster Coulibaly; the ex-cons Merah in Toulouse, Nemmouche in Marseille, Kouachi in Paris, and Anis Amri in Berlin, whose rudimentary intellectual level is reflected in their calamitous communiqués, really the generals of a “jihadi army” against which France and other European countries are “at war,” to adopt the expression François Hollande used in speaking to a plenary meeting of the French National Assembly and Senate? Or should the stakes be defined more precisely to avoid risking an ill-considered response that falls into the trap that ISIS has laid for Europe? Apart from the anxiety that it elicits, this terrorism—which reached an apex in 2015 and 2016—is in fact intended to “savage” (tawahhoush) an “infidel” society fragmented into denominational ghettos until it collapses into a civil war between enclaves. This mad apocalyptic vision on the part of the jihadis feeds on the fantasy of a possible recruitment of their co-religionists, who are supposed to feel victimized by “Islamophobia,” itself instigated by the massacres perpetrated by the jihadis, and thus be all the more prepared to assemble under their bloodstained banner. From this point of view, the massacres of November 13, 2015, in Paris, Nice in July, and Berlin in December 2016 differ from those of January 7–9, 2015, in Paris. The great parades that followed the latter on January 11, the largest in French history, marked the nation’s refusal to allow itself to be drawn into the self-destructive spiral that ISIS is trying to set in motion. But the slogan #jesuisCharlie had a kind of ambiguity—analyzed in detail in the last chapter of this book—that estranged from the demonstrations certain groups, notably some Muslims, who saw them as expressing approval of the defamatory caricatures of the Prophet rather than solidarity with the victims of the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly.

The situation was quite different in the wake of November 13. Despite the claim made by ISIS’s communiqué, already reproduced verbatim, with its faulty, ill-educated French boasting that the “holy razzia” caused the death of a “minimum of 200 Crusaders,” numerous targets had no relationship to “Crusades” or even to the Christianity that provided the pretext. If Paris is stigmatized for having “carried the banner of the Cross in Europe,” the expression is ill chosen to describe Paris’s tenth and eleventh arrondissements. As the contemporary Arabic scholar and historian Pierre-Jean Luizard put it:

In the neighborhoods that were attacked, young people can be seen smoking and drinking as they socialize with others who are going to the mosque. That is what ISIS wants to destroy by pushing French society to turn in upon itself […], so that each individual no longer sees others in relation to what they think or what they are, but in relation to their membership in a community.

Seeking further to justify the crime, ISIS’s communiqué describes the audience at the Bataclan as an assembly of “idolaters” engaging in a “celebration of perversity.” In doctrinal Islam, even if the Arabic text introduces other connotations, idolatry is punishable by death without reprieve. The “idolaters” are the mushrikin, those who associate other divinities with Allah the One and Only, and the concert was “an orgy of prostitution” (haflat ‘ahir fajira). The disqualification in moral terms, which is excessive with regard to a simple rock concert and which only the most fanatical find convincing, reminds us of the scenes showing the killing of homosexuals by throwing them off tall buildings in Raqqa and Homs that ISIS put online in the form of educational videos, as if the morals that rule the “caliphate” had to be immediately transposed in Paris.

It is hard to see how such rhetoric could elicit support among the French Muslims whom ISIS wants to enlist in its crimes. Contrary to what happened in the days that followed the Merah and Kouachi- Coulibaly affairs, thousands of “likes” did not appear on Facebook walls or Twitter threads. If, unsurprisingly, the jihadosphere went wild, a large number of statements coming from Muslim milieus whose backing ISIS expected to gain described it as their worst enemy. Take, for example, the one made by Tarek, a thirty-three-year-old eyewitness to the failed attacks at the Stade de France, who told reporters: “France at war can count on its banlieues.” And the same reactions were witnessed after the attack in Nice on July 14, 2016, where the truck that Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove into the crowd, an attack claimed by ISIS as a legitimate retaliation against the “crusader coalition bombings on the caliphate,” killed 86 people—30 of them with Muslim names—including scores of children.

It is true that scenes that reminded us of the civil wars in Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Syria, or Iraq, and that had previously been seen only on television screens, were suddenly transposed into the heart of continental France, and then Belgium and Germany. Does that mean that ISIS has succeeded in triggering the conflict it hopes for? Or could one say, as François Hollande did during his address to the legislators assembled in Versailles after the attacks, that “the acts committed Friday night in Paris and near the Stade de France are acts of war? They are the work of a jihadi army that is fighting us because France is a land of freedom, because France is the homeland of the rights of man”? By using in an unprecedented way the expression “jihadi army,” which presupposes that the latter is the instrument of a genuine state, the president of the French Republic strangely provided ISIS with a confirmation of its claim. The struggle against ISIS in Syria and Iraq certainly requires military means—notably, the navy and the air force. But the fight against terrorism on French, Belgian, German, or any European and Western territory is first of all a matter for the police. It requires an ability to analyze the European terrain on which this phenomenon developed and to relate it to the mutations of international jihadism that have taken place since the latter’s initial emergence in Afghanistan in the 1980s, passing by way of al-Qaeda and September 11. If we fail to understand the genesis of French jihad, for which we now have an in-depth case study that can be considered a paradigm for other Western countries, we doom ourselves to a political myopia that constitutes, alas, the mental horizon of a ruling class whose inanity jihadism has exposed—and that voters condemn in elections by increasingly casting their votes for far-right candidates.

The emotion aroused by the November 13 massacres had hardly begun to share the front pages of the media with other news before the posters for the French regional elections of December 2015 went up in front of schools that had been transformed into voting stations. In this election, the National Front achieved particularly high scores in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, and it is in precisely these regions, as I repeatedly point out in my study Passion française (Gallimard, 2014), that we find the deepest ethnoreligious fissures in the social fabric.

In this respect, the massacres that occurred in November 2015, and prepared the way for what would happen in 2016 in France and its neighbouring countries, were revealing and can be explained only by situating them in their context. The communiqué that opens these pages, claiming responsibility for the “holy raid,” makes sense only as an echo of a whole worldview that must be deciphered in all its dimensions. The following remarks, which are reproduced verbatim, can serve as an introduction. They were published online in 2015 and disseminated through the social networks of ISIS under the title “How to Survive in the West. A Mujahid’s Guide 2015”:

A real war is heating up in the heart of Europe. Many Muslims are putting a lot of effort into showing the world that we are peaceful citizens, we’re spending thousands of Euros to do Da’wah (invitation to Islam) campaigns to show how good we are in society, but we’re miserably failing. The leaders of disbelief repeatedly lie in the media and say that we Muslims are all terrorists, while we denied it and tried to be peaceful citizens. But they have cornered us and forced us into becoming radicalized, and that will be the cause of their defeat and the cause for the conquest of Rome. The people who own the media have had Europe and the Western world as their stronghold for over 1000 years, they do not want Islam to rise in their stronghold. They want to keep their authority, their adultery, wine and money and do not want to lose it. So they are doing a multibillion dollar media campaign to stop the Islamic State in the Middle East, and a multibillion dollar media campaign to stop the rise of real Islam in the West. All the major alcohol, gambling and haraam companies are funding this project because if Islam rises in the West, they will lose everything. It is a matter of life or death for both, only one will survive. Allah (God)’s last Messenger Muhammad (peace be on Him) promised us we will win and finally take over Europe’s capital—Rome, but only after we have taken Persia (Iran) […].

In the Ummah (Nation) of Prophet Muhammad (saws), we have been taught to physically fight to defend ourselves and our religion, no matter where we are in the world. If you disagree with Armed defense, and you are a pacifist, then remember that you will be imprisoned for your religion now or in the future, then ask yourself if you will be able to maintain your Iman (Faith) there. Those who go on the offensive earlier will learn how to react in different situations, and will more likely receive martyrdom (shahadah) instead of long-term imprisonment.

1 The French National Stadium, located just north of Paris in the commune of Saint-Denis. (All footnotes are the translator’s.)

² “Total Islam,” or Islam intégral, refers to an all-encompassing version of Islam that seeks to shape its followers’ beliefs and actions at all times and in every sphere of life.