France’s Homegrown Jihadists

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/28/opinion/sylvie-kauffmann-frances-homegrown-jihadists.html

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PARIS — When Dominique Bons speaks with her soft Toulouse accent, there is something tragic and dignified about this thin blond woman, recently retired from the military. Last December, she learned by text message of the death of her son Nicolas.

A French citizen who had converted to Islam, Nicolas Bons, 30, died as a suicide bomber, fighting for the jihadi cause near Homs, Syria. A few months earlier, his half brother, Jean-Daniel, 22, had also been killed in Syria. The two had traveled together to Syria from Toulouse.

Once there, they became poster boys for foreign jihad. They even posted a video on YouTube, calling on their “brothers” in France to join them.

Ms. Bons, herself an atheist, had watched helplessly as Nicolas changed his lifestyle, turning away from friends, drinking, dancing, dating. But when he sent a message from Syria, she was at a loss to understand.

“To convert to Islam, O.K., maybe this is not so serious,” she told the television channel France 2. “But Syria, that was a big shock.”

Stories of homegrown jihadists are becoming tragically familiar this year in France. A month after Nicolas’s death, also in Toulouse, two teenagers (whose names have not been released as they are minors), left one morning apparently to go to school; instead, they went to the airport and boarded a plane to Istanbul.

Once in Turkey, they called their parents to say they would be silent for a month, then flew closer to the Syrian border, which they crossed easily. The father of one of the boys, a Frenchman of Tunisian origin, also appeared on television, saying he was “shattered.” Like Ms. Bons, this middle-class father could not comprehend.

Eventually, the two grew disillusioned with the jihad, could not put up with the cold and left Syria. Back in France, they were charged with involvement in a “terrorist enterprise.”

Recruitment is still rising: An estimated 700 to 800 French citizens have gone to fight in Syria since the war started, with an increase of 75 percent in the last six months. According to the Interior Ministry, about 350 are currently fighting the Assad regime and at least 30 have been killed.

Foreign fighters in Syria come from all over Europe, but the French have provided the biggest group. French journalists held since last year in the infamous “factory of hostages” area near Aleppo, and released in April, were dismayed to discover that some of their hooded guards were, in fact, their countrymen.

This is not happening in faraway Waziristan. This new jihad is just on the other side of the Mediterranean. European Union citizens don’t even need a visa to go to Turkey, bordering Syria.

Who are these young men and, in some cases, women? What drives them? The days of Al Qaeda cells, of groups formed in radical mosques, easily monitored by police, are gone, experts say. This is the era of “lone wolves” — self-radicalized or radicalized in prison, brainwashed with videos of violence and martyrdom circulated on the Internet.

Recruiters, said Gilles Kepel, a professor at Sciences Po in Paris and an expert on political Islam, “have been very shrewd at using the language of social networks.” The GoPro camera, used to film attacks in real time, “provides the link between virtual and real.”

Mohammed Merah, 23 at the time, had a camera attached to his chest when he shot dead three French servicemen in Toulouse and nearby Montauban in March 2012. He also filmed his attack a few days later on a Toulouse Jewish school, where he killed three children and a teacher.

Many of the French jihadists come from the banlieues, the segregated suburban housing projects of big cities, but radical Islam also recruits among middle-class families. The French policy of strict secularism, which prohibits the burqa in public places and the Islamic head scarf in public schools, is a grievance used to attract female jihadists.

The French government, which has long relied on tough antiterrorist legislation, is tempted to take even harsher steps. It set up a toll-free phone line at the end of April to help concerned families, and in the first week alone, 24 cases of would-be jihadists, five of whom had already left for Syria, were uncovered. But the real shock came on May 30, when Mehdi Nemmouche was arrested in Marseilles, on a bus from Amsterdam, carrying a bag full of weapons and jihadist paraphernalia. Mr. Nemmouche, 29, has been held since then as the main suspect in the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels, which cost four lives on May 24.

Born in Roubaix, in what used to be the industrial heartland of France, to a broken French-Algerian family, he ran into trouble early and was jailed seven times in 10 years. The last sentence, five years for robbery, sealed his fate: Behind bars, he met radical Islamists and became one.

Three weeks after his release in December 2012, he went to Syria, where he fought for more than a year. Mr. Nemmouche’s jihad represents a step further: He is the first French fighter to come back from the Syrian battlefield to carry the jihad into the heart of Europe. With him, the dreaded threat has become reality.

Six months ago, Manuel Valls, then the interior minister, warned that jihadism is “the greatest danger we will have to face in the next few years.” Now, as prime minister, he is scrambling for new measures and European cooperation on the issue. But his fellow countrymen are still struggling to understand the deeper meaning of this menace in their midst.

Sylvie Kauffmann is the editorial director and a former editor in chief of Le Monde.