France will be a reservoir for jihadists for years to come

I interviewed Marie, the mother of a French convert to Islam who joined Islamic State, in late 2014.

After the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre that killed 17 people, she told me she would rather Timothée die in Syria than commit an atrocity in France.

I received a sad message from Marie last week. “We’re in shock,” she wrote.

A stranger had informed her through WhatsApp that Timothée was dead “without a precise date or place . . . Cruel and impossible to verify”.

Islamic State sometimes announces the death of jihadists before they carry out suicide attacks in Europe.

The family of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of the November 13th attacks in Paris, received a similar message two months before the slaughter. They said they hoped it was true.

Marie has no way of knowing if Timothée was about to be used for a suicide attack. She will probably never receive proof of his death, or retrieve his body.

Islamic State, or those inspired by it, have killed in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.

But the jihadists' conflict with France is arguably the most intense. The "holy war" is inside and from, as well as against, France.

There are several reasons for this lethal entanglement with jihad. Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim populations often confront each other in France.

Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced yesterday that acts against the Muslim community tripled to about 400 last year, while anti-Semitic acts decreased slightly to 806.

Bombardment

It is illegal to collect ethnic or religious statistics in France, but Muslims are believed to number some eight million, the legacy of French colonisation of Arab north Africa.

Most of white, Christian France seems to have forgotten the crusades, the 1920-1946 Syrian mandate and the 1830-1962 occupation of Algeria.

But for many Muslims, history is a festering wound. When France began bombing Islamic State in Syria last September, few recalled that the French army fought Syrian insurgents from 1920 until 1923, or that France ended its mandate with a 36-hour bombardment of Damascus that claimed hundreds of Arab lives.

The 1954-1962 Algerian war was the most brutal of colonial conflicts. Almost all the French Muslims who have attacked their own country were the children of Algerians.

Khaled Kelkal, gunned down by gendarmes near Lyon in 1995, was the first.

When Le Monde investigated Kelkal’s life and death 20 years later, his uncle Ahmed told the newspaper that Kelkal’s grandfather had been shot dead by a French soldier in Mostaganem in 1962.

Although they were French citizens born in France, the Kouachi brothers, who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre, referred to the French by the derogatory slang term céfran and forbade their sister from dating "Frenchmen".

The presence of a large Muslim population who do not identify with France, combined with a stagnant economy and high unemployment, will continue to provide a reservoir for jihadists for years to come.

Official talk of breaking the “apartheid” of the French banlieues evaporated after the November 13th attacks.

France’s high profile in foreign and defence policy has also made it a target for jihadists.

The country’s last two presidents abandoned General Charles de Gaulle’s “Arab policy” and leaned in favour of Israel, through repeated assaults on Gaza and the advent of the most right-wing Israeli government ever.

President François Hollande has engaged France in more wars than any other president of the Fifth Republic – in Mali, the Central African Republic, the Sahel region, Iraq and Syria.

“The mere juxtaposition of the terms ‘French’ and ‘jihad’ seems an aberration,” says academic Gilles Kepel.

His new book, Terror in the Hexagon: Genesis of French Jihad, chronicles what Kepel calls “the concomitance between the third generation of jihadists and the third generation of French immigrants”.

The US and Saudi Arabia launched the present form of extreme Sunni jihadism in 1979, against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and as a counterweight to the Iranian revolution.

The Mujahideen drove the Soviets out, then staged failed insurgencies in Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s.

The al-Qaeda atrocities of 9/11 and their attempts to transform the US occupation of Iraq into a new Vietnam were the second generation of jihad.

Then 2005 was the starting point for the third generation, Kepel says.

In that year, Abu Musab al-Suri published his 1,600-page Global Islamic Resistance Call urging jihadists to exploit the presence of a large, disaffected Muslim populations in Europe, “the soft underbelly of the West”.

That year also saw the advent of YouTube which, after the fax and satellite television, became the jihadists’ medium of choice.

France’s immigrant population was also evolving. In 1983, their demands for equality in the “Marche des Beurs” went unheard.

“If we had created an Arab Muslim elite, it would have created models the others could identify with,” Kepel says with regret.

The first generation of Muslim immigrants worked hard and kept their faith to themselves.

The second generation, which failed to prevent the banning of the Muslim headscarf in French schools, was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The third generation was figuratively born with the 2005 riots, which were sparked by the electrocution of two teenagers in a power station, but also by the perception that French forces desecrated a mosque in a Paris suburb.

Gang leaders

Thereafter, a growing number of French Muslims followed Salafist preachers who harked back to the time of the Prophet, preparing the ground for jihadism.

To maintain peace, French officials often co-operated with caïds or gang leaders in the banlieues, schools and prisons.

A significant number of caïds converted to radical Islam. French prisons have been an incubator for jihad, transforming young men convicted of theft or drug-dealing into jihadists.

Also in 2005, Djamel Beghal, a mentor of French jihadists, was imprisonedwith Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly.

The January 2015 attacks can be traced directly back to their co-detention. Lara Marlowe will lecture on Fatal Attraction:  France and the Middle East at the Abbey Theatre's "Theatre of Change" symposium tomorrow at 3.50pm