The Regretful Muslim Jihadists of the Islamic State
The West is terrified of foreign fighters of Muslim Jihadists returning home from Iraq and Syria. But not all of them are trying to bring jihad into their Live
In Sept. 24, as the U.N. Security Council prepared to adopt a resolution aimed at tackling the threat of foreign terrorist fighters around the world, French security services were wrapping up a "jihadist arrest" that seemed worthy of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau.
Three Frenchmen suspected of fighting with extremist groups in Syria finally arrived in Paris after briefly walking free due to a series of glaring mishaps that highlight the challenges confronting European authorities as they tackle the next step on the "jihadist tourism trail": the return of battle-hardened, radicalized EU nationals coming home from holy war.
The botched arrest of the three suspected jihadists began in Turkey, where they were initially detained after crossing the border from Syria. Abdelouahab El Baghdadi, Imad Djebali, and Gael Maurize, all French nationals hailing from southern French towns and cities, were supposed to arrive on Sept. 23 at Paris's Orly Airport, where French security officials, alerted by their Turkish counterparts, were waiting to take them for questioning and start legal proceedings.
Instead, the trio landed hundreds of miles away, in the French port city of Marseille, after the pilot of the Paris-bound commercial flight refused to allow the men aboard because they lacked the necessary documents.
French officials blamed their Turkish counterparts for a last-minute decision to put the terror suspects on a Marseille-bound flight without informing them.
But the mishaps to come were exclusively French. As intelligence officials waited at Orly Airport, the three unaccompanied men arrived at Marseille and sailed through passport control since the centralized security software was not working. Undaunted, the French Interior Ministry said the suspects had been arrested at Orly and were being questioned -- only to backtrack when it became clear this was not the case.
The next part of the suspects' return is pure jihadist satire material -- a sort of French sequel to the Chris Morris comedy, Four Lions. According to lawyers for the three suspects, their clients were surprised to find no security official waiting for them upon their arrival at Marseille. So the trio rented a car at the airport, headed northeast toward Toulouse, their home city, and then tried to turn themselves in for questioning at a village police station along the way -- only to find the police were away on their rounds.
The saga of three known jihadist suspects failing to voluntarily turn themselves in to French authorities continued until they reached the village of Le Caylar, around 150 miles east of Toulouse, where they finally surrendered to police and were then flown to Paris. Baghdadi, Djebali, and Maurize were then placed under formal investigation for criminal association with a terrorist group with the aim of planning terrorist acts. The three men admit to traveling to Syria, but deny having fought there or plotting terrorist attacks in France.
For French authorities, the bungled arrest was particularly embarrassing given the high profiles of the suspects. Baghdadi (no relation to self-declared Islamic State caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) is the brother-in-law of infamous "Toulouse gunman" Mohamed Merah, who murdered seven people in three 2012 attacks before he was killed in a shootout with the police. The Merah family saga -- as told by Abdelghani Merah, one of the brothers, in his book Mon Frère, Ce Terroriste (My Brother, the Terrorist) -- is a dismal story of a broken immigrant family in France's troubled banlieues (suburbs), with a largely absent father dealing drugs before abandoning the family for his native Algeria, leaving a single mother unable to cope with her children's slide from petty crimes to Islamist extremism.
Djebali, a childhood friend of the Toulouse gunman, appears to hail from a similar background and was arrested in 2009 on terrorism charges. All three men were already under investigation in September 2013 in a case involving the so-called Artigat network of jihadists, named for the village in southern France where they were reportedly based.
Meanwhile, across the English Channel, there have been similarly fraught attempts to return from the fighting in Syria and Iraq. Earlier this month, a group of British jihadists contacted a London-based anti-radicalization group to say they regretted joining a militant group in Syria affiliated with Islamic State (IS) and they wanted to come home. But, they said, they feared arrest.
"We came to fight the [Bashar al-Assad] regime and instead we are involved in gang warfare. It's not what we came for but if we go back [to Britain] we will go to jail," a British national, who claimed to speak for about 30 disillusioned jihadists, told researchers at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), according to the Times of London.
As the trickle of foreign fighters to Syria turned into a flood over the past year, Western and regional governments have fretted over the fallout from thousands of their citizens jumping on the Syria-bound jihadist bandwagon. But even as authorities are struggling to address the issue -- releasing estimates of the numbers of their nationals in the region and setting up deradicalization programs -- the jihadist tourism train has already started chugging its way home. The flow of fighters heading to and from the battlefields in Syria and Iraq has opened new legal fronts in their home countries, with governments rushing through measures to stem the tide of those heading for holy war on the one hand, and dealing with the returnees on the other. The debate is particularly intense in democratic countries, which have to balance security policies in a new era of terror threats with civil liberties. Western Europe, with its geographic proximity to the Middle East, its large immigrant communities of Arabic- and Turkish-speakers, its open borders, and the sheer numbers of its citizen-jihadists, is at the forefront of this legal tussle raging in many capitals across the world.
Home to Europe's biggest Muslim community and source of the largest number of Western fighters in the Syria-Iraq conflict zone, France has the unenviable distinction of being ahead of the curve in the latest jihadist tourism trail. According to the French Interior Ministry, nearly 1,000 French nationals had traveled or are planning to travel to the region. In an interview with the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve noted that some jihadists who have returned home boast about their battlefield exploits and vow to go back on a second mission.
France felt the first blowback from the Syrian conflict on May 24, when Mehdi Nemmouche, a French national of Algerian origin, allegedly attacked the Brussels Jewish Museum in neighboring Belgium, killing four people. Four former French hostages, who were held by jihadists in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo in 2013, have identified Nemmouche as one of their guards -- a particularly sadistic one -- while in captivity. The 29-year-old French jihadist's journey back home underscores the difficulties European authorities face tracking terror suspects. A juvenile delinquent turned criminal, Nemmouche was convicted seven times between 2004 and 2009 for petty crimes. Just weeks after his December 2012 release from a French jail, a newly radicalized Nemmouche made his way to Syria, where he stayed for a year before going back to Europe via Turkey, transiting through Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand before landing in Frankfurt, where German officials alerted their French counterparts of his entry, according to the French daily Le Monde. But Nemmouche was not followed by the police and "on leaving the airport, he was able to go wherever he wanted and he had freedom of movement," a French judicial source told the newspaper.
