Why this has stunned Paris — but isn’t a surprise

Estimates by European governments suggest over 2,000 fighters from the continent are now fighting in West Asia — numbers, a senior French official had told The Indian Express in an interview last month in Paris. Security services have been struggling to identify and monitor them.

Late last month, French intelligence services issued warnings on possible strikes, leading the government to deploy additional security at public places through the Christmas and New Year.

The warnings followed the release, in November, of a video showing three French jihadists, armed with assault rifles and knives, calling on Muslims to stage strikes against their fellow citizens. “Terrorise them and do not allow them to sleep due to fear and horror”, a terrorist identifying himself as Abu Salman al-Faransi says. “There are weapons and cars available, and targets ready to be hit”.

In November, Paris prosecutor François Molins had identified 1992-born French national Maxime Hauchard as one of the men seen beheading United States aid worker Peter Kassig in a video released by the terrorist group Dawlah Islamiyya, or Islamic State.
Hauchard, a resident of the northern Normandy region, had converted to Islam as a teenager, after making contact with religious radicals on the internet.

Elite counter-terrorism units arrested 10 suspects in raids on over a dozen locations to arrest members of jihad recruitment rings, mainly centred around the southern city of Tolouse, but also in Paris and the north.

The French government estimates that some 1,000 of its citizens are serving jihadist groups in West Asia, some 400 in direct combat roles. In a recent study based on official statistics, Norwegian Defense Research Establishment researcher Thomas Hegghammer put the Europe-wide number at 2,000.

Local media reports, however, suggest the numbers of French jihadists may be higher. In March last year, a French jihadist identifying himself as “Abu Shaheed” told the magazine Paris Match that there were at least 500 French jihadists serving with the Islamic State alone. He claimed there were five or six purely French-speaking katiba, or brigades, consisting of second and third-generation immigrants from France and Belgium, who know no Arabic.

“There are lots and lots of them”, he said. “The place is covered with French (recruits). I couldn’t even count them all.”

In mid-February 2014, video emerged of cadre in one French unit based at Hraytan, near the Syrian city of Aleppo, laughing and cheering as they towed bodies of executed opponents behind a pick-up truck. “In the past, we towed jet skis, motorcycles and quad bikes,” the Belgian driver of the pickup says in the video, “now we tow murtads (apostates) and kuffar (unbelievers).”

French-speaking jihadists also produced an execution video at the town of Azaz, near Syria’s border with Turkey, showing four heads — two of teenagers — arranged around a headless torso at the base of a monument with the words “Azaz City Council” painted on it.
The country’s public conversation on Islamism has sharpened in recent months, after multiple cases of the recruitment of young women by jihadists involved.

One high-profile case involved Sahra Mehault, the daughter of mixed-race parents Severinne Mehault and Kamal Mehenni — the mother an atheist, the father a non-practising Muslim who says he does not go to mosques or observe the Ramzan fast. Sahra Mehault secretly left France after being recruited online last year, and later announced that she had married “Farid,” an Islamic State jihadist, Dounia Bouzar, an anthropologist who has worked with French Islamists seeking to become jihadists, told The Indian Express that while jihadists were earlier recruited mainly from working-class youth angry over poverty and discrimination, now “three-quarters of them come from atheist families” often with high levels of education.

The recruits, she has found, are picked up by online recruitment rings, often looking for idealists alienated from their social milieu, and looking for a dramatic cause.

The recruitment has been cast, in some media accounts, as a consequence of France’s muscular secularism — in particular, laws which forbid some forms of public display of ostentatious religious symbols, like the hijab, Sikh turbans, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses.

However, a senior French official noted that countries which do not have these laws — among them the United Kingdom and Belgium — have larger numbers of recruits with the Islamic State.