The arrest of Mehdi Nemmouche on a bus in Marseille on May 30th has underlined a growing threat facing France and many other European nations – that of home-grown terrorists returning to wage war after fighting in Syria. Nemmouche, who was picked up during a security check, is wanted for the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels on May 24th that left four people dead. It has since emerged that the suspect, a French national, had gone to fight against the Assad regime in Syria. He is not alone.
As of May 30th 2014, some 320 French nationals were fighting in Syria, 140 others were heading for the civil war there and a similar number were making their way back, according to figures from the French intelligence services. In all 30 French nationals have been killed in Syria. Overall at least 630 people from France have been to Syria to take up arms against the Assad government since the conflict began three years ago. By contrast the intelligence agencies believe that the number of French citizens who took part in jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s was around 40.
France is far from being the only country faced with this problem. At the end of 2013 the London-based think tank The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) estimated that up to 11,000 non-Syrians had gone to take part in the civil war there since 2011, with 2,000 of them coming from the 26 countries who make up Europe's Schengen zone.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In fact, the risk posed by jihadists returning to commit terror attacks at home has been known about for some time. “The principal threat on French soil certainly seems to come from individuals who return to France having trained in jihad zones, which are more and more numerous and accessible,” said a report back in May 2013 from a parliamentary commission presided over by Christophe Cavard that investigated how effectively the French intelligence services were monitoring radical armed movements. But Mehdi Nemmouche's arrest has reinforced the point. According to the French ministry of the interior Nemmouche was the subject of a French police file and was also on the pan-European data-sharing system known as the Schengen Information System during his stay in Syria, where he fought with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group. The 29-year-old Frenchman had left for Syria at the end of December 2012, travelling via Brussels, London, Beirut and Istanbul. He was then flagged by the German authorities on his return to Europe on March 18th, 2014 during passport control at Frankfurt Airport. But then he disappeared from sight until his arrest during an “unexpected check” by Marseille customs officers on a bus that had come from Amsterdam in Holland via Brussels.
Faced with such a huge and unparalleled phenomenon “the European [security] services are overwhelmed”, says investigating magistrate Marc Trévidic, who works in the antiterrorism unit at the Paris courts. At the ministry of the interior officials speak of “the presence on an unprecedented scale” of home-grown jihadists, and describe it as an “issue of major concern”. One official notes: “We cannot rule out a new Mohamed Merah [editor's note, who shot and killed seven people in three different attacks in south-west France in March 2012] or a new Mehdi Nemmouch, the security services can't watch everyone.” According to an anti-terrorist specialist interviewed by news agency AFP, each fighter who returns is hauled in by the French authorities, interviewed and warned that they could be kept under surveillance. But unable to keep everyone under watch all the time, the security services have chosen instead to draw up lists of priority targets according to the perceived danger of potential suspects.
Naturally, not everyone who goes to fight against Bashar al-Assad's regime is a potential terrorist when they return to France. Indeed, according to Marc Trévidic many youngsters who come back only think about leaving again. “I've had enough of being monitored and kept under watch on social networks by the French security services, I'll never come back,” one 27-year-old Frenchman who had fought for the Al Qaeda-supporting group the Al-Nusra Front in Syria told Libération newspaper.
Faced with this threat, the main approach of states so far has been one of repression. According to one judicial source the anti-terrorist unit of the Paris courts has opened criminal proceedings in 50 cases involving people who are ready to leave, have already left or have returned from Syria. On March 7th, 2014 a criminal court in Paris handed out jail terms of between two and four years on three would-be jihadists arrested in May 2012 at Saint-Étienne Airport in south-eastern France as they were ready to board a plane for Gaziantep in Turkey via Istanbul. The three young men were prosecuted for “criminal conspiracy to prepare terrorist acts”, which in their case meant going to Syria to procure weapons, undergo military training and fight.
However, this kind of preventative justice raises many questions. “It's now considered that wanting to go on jihad makes you a terrorist, yet things are not so simple as that,” Marc Trévidic warned while giving evidence to parliamentarians in 2013. “In the past you intervened after an investigation had allowed you to work out what the individuals were preparing on the ground, and you didn't consider that the simple fact of going on jihad somewhere was a terrorist act in itself; we knew very well that they had been going to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, or the Serbs in Bosnia. These were not 'terrorists' as they were in our camp...”
In May 2013 the parliamentary report into the surveillance of radical armed groups revealed the thinking of certain magistrates. “Some of them seem reticent to classify the act of fighting alongside Islamist groups as terrorist activity and see it rather as a form of legitimate resistance against the Bashar al-Assad regime,” note the authors. Meanwhile a Parisian lawyer who specialises in terrorist cases says drily: “If you're with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) you're the saviour of humanity, if you're with the Al-Nusra Front you're bad.”
In the United Kingdom the prosecutor in charge of terrorism cases has no such scruples. In February 2014 Sue Hemming warned her fellow citizens that anyone who went to fight in Syria should expect to be prosecuted on their return and risked a life sentence. “Potentially it’s an offence to go out and get involved in a conflict, however loathsome you think the people on the other side are,” she said in an interview. The 2006 Terrorism Act in Britain in fact outlaws any preparatory act and any help to another person in such activities, as well as training in camps. As a writer noted in the British newspaper The Guardian: “If George Orwell and Laurie Lee were to return from the Spanish civil war today, they would be arrested under section five of the Terrorism Act 2006. If convicted of fighting abroad with a 'political, ideological, religious or racial motive' – a charge they would find hard to contest – they would face a maximum sentence of life in prison.”
'It shouldn't just be left to the cops'
The UK and France have both decided to appeal to families to take pre-emptive action in a bid to curb the radicalisation of their youngsters and stop them heading off to Syria. Most observes agree there is a lot of work to be done. In January 2014 the Catholic daily La Croix revealed extracts from a report on radicalisation that had been written by the General Secretariat for Defence and National Security (SGDSN). According to the newspaper this report, which was sent to the prime minister – Jean-Marc Ayrault at the time – in October 2013, painted a grim picture of the “measures in place”, criticising the absence of research on the whereabouts of young radicals, the lack of “common criteria for [their] detection” and a policy that was exclusively focused on “repression”. Its author Yann Jounot, then director at the SGDSN, concluded: “No strategy of preventative action exists with regard to the people detected to help them get out of the process.”
On June 2nd the interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve sought to calm the situation. He told Europe 1 radio: “These activities have nothing to do with Islam. They are a result of being wrapped up in a radicalised violence that could have taken forms other than religion, on the part of young people who have no religious culture.”
The question remains, however, how one combats such radicalism. “It shouldn't just be left to the cops, if you'll pardon the expression, for it's not only about guaranteeing security,” Mathieu Guidère, a professor at Toulouse II– Le Mirail university in south-west France and a specialist on the mindset of Al Qaeda, told parliamentarians in February 2013. “The radical Islamists, the jihadists and all similar armed groups consider that they are fighting a just war, and that's why they are prepared to die for their cause. But above all they are dragging us into an ideological struggle, which we can only pursue by using the most intelligent people.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
In an attempt to make some headway on the issue, one of the measures in the anti-jihad plan put forward by Bernard Cazeneuve in April will allow parents whose child is visiting pro-terrorist websites to alert a specially-created until so that they can be counselled and supported over what to do. According to a memo from the ministry of the interior to other French ministries on June 3rd, this national hotline, set up at the end of April, has already enabled the authorities to “deal with 126 useful alerts, of which 32 involved minors, 48 involved women and 20 involved confirmed departures”.
Yet in both the UK and France, attempts to involve the families of people likely to go abroad to fight have raised scepticism among both specialists and families themselves. David Thomson, author of the book Les Français jihadistes ('French jihadists'), says lectures from their parents have not had much effect on the majority of young people heading for Syria, who in fact have expressly broken with a Muslim community whom they judge to be too permissive.
“Radicalisation is not a gradual process but an abrupt break and it doesn't take place in either the mosques or prisons,” writes academic Jean-Pierre Filiu. “It's therefore pointless mobilising imams, parents or 'big brothers' to curb this threat, for [this radicalism] is expressly developed against such social and cultural reference points.” The views of Amina Deghayes, the aunt of an 18-year-old Briton who was killed in Syria in April 2014, tend to back this up. “If the steps are to speak to the guys before they leave, I think people already have – they do not need the government to tell them that,” she told The Guardian.
Meanwhile the French authorities have also put pressure on their Turkish counterparts to persuade them to keep better watch on their borders with Syria. On Thursday June 5th interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve and his Belgian opposite number, Joëlle Milquet, took charge of a meeting in Brussels of the nine European countries most affected by jihadism. The two ministers put forward plans to improve the exchange of information between intelligence services – in particular on air passengers, as France created a new system for collecting such data at the end of 2013 – and the monitoring of the content of messages posted on the internet. “We call on the European Commission to talk to the internet operators and to make them aware of their responsibilities over the content posted on their systems,” said a French interior ministry spokesperson.
Before the summer recess Bernard Cazeneuve is due to present the legislative part of the anti-jihad plan to Parliament, which allows for “banning adult French nationals linked to terrorist activities from leaving”. More enigmatically it also provides for the “legal ability for French [intelligence] services to put in operation investigation techniques and methods of making use of data that are not yet open to them”. According to the ministry of the interior this refers to the setting up of cyber patrols that will allow investigators to infiltrate jihadist sites, following the example of what is already done in the fight against paedophilia.
The ministry is also considering the creation of a “new offence relating to the preparation of acts of terrorism by an individual acting on their own”. French law already allows for the preventative punishment of terrorist plans even before any any action is carried out, under the very flexible offence of “criminal conspiracy in relation to a terrorist enterprise”. But according to Bernard Cazeneuve this offence is “no longer a sufficient guarantee”. Last Thursday prime minister Manuel Valls hammered home the point during question time in the French Senate. “We must not rule out anything as long, obviously, as it conforms to our law and to our Constitution.” He added: “We must reflect very intelligently...[on the way that] we can better anticipate, even punish, the very fact of just wanting to go and fight abroad.”
But the concept of criminal conspiracy is already a very broad one. In May 2012 a criminal court in Paris handed out a five-year jail term to Adlène Hicheur, a physicist from the nuclear research centre CERN, over an exchange of emails with a mystery correspondent. This other person, who was said to be a senior figure in Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), was never formally identified, though his name was given in some media reports as Mustapha Debchi.
“We have been much criticised for having used the idea of criminal conspiracy too extensively; rather than being hypocritical let's be open about it,” says examining magistrate Marc Trévidic, who is a fan of this new offence. “For example, some young people who are indoctrinated on the internet try to join a group and are refused by the emir [of that group]. We can't take proceedings because there is no criminal association. They are rare cases but they exist,” says the judge. At the other end of the ideological spectrum Trévidic cites the example of a 23-year-old French soldier who was close to the extreme right and who had admitted to a plan to shoot at a mosque in Vénissieux, a suburb of Lyon in east France. However, in March 2014 the court of appeal announced there was no case to answer on the charge because there had been no criminal association.
However Trévidic warns: “We must be precise in drawing up this new offence, it should be characterised by [the presence of] several material facts, and not by 'one or several material facts' as in [the offence of] criminal conspiracy in relation to a terrorist enterprise.” The new offence is still under consideration, but the ministry of the interior says it could involve individuals who meet at least two of the three following criteria: they have surveyed a place or people in a regular fashion, they have got hold of weapons, or they have frequently looked at propaganda websites or forums. The ministry of the interior is still discussing the details with the ministry of justice.
France's anti-terrorist strategy is 'partially outdated'
France's antiterrorism measures had already been strengthened at the end of 2012, ten months after the Merah affair, by the then-minister of the interior Manuel Valls. The law passed on December 21st 2012 now allows terrorist acts committed abroad by French nationals or residents, including undergoing armed training, to be punished in France. But at the time Valls was opposed to the creation of a specific offence just for individuals operating on their own, considering that such an approach would have had “no concrete, practical, effective impact on Mohamed Merah's behaviour”. He added: “Over and above the measures that we come up with, over and above the judicial response, over and above the creation of new offences, the answer is down to the organisation of the domestic intelligence services and the means that we want to give them.”
In May 2013 a parliamentary examination of the judicial framework of the intelligence services, led by the socialist president of the National Assembly's law committee Jean-Jacques Urvoas, judged that France's antiterrorism strategy was “partially outdated”. According to the report's authors the domestic intelligence agency the Direction Centrale du Renseignement intérieur (DCRI), created in June 2008, has suffered from inheriting the same ultra-centralised organisation and culture as the counter-terrorism organization the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) that it replaced in a merger between the DST and the Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux, known as the RG. It is not adapted to the current terrorist threats which are “[at] sub-state level, non-conventional, dynamic, diffuse and unpredictable”, the report noted. One of the committee's expert witnesses stated: “The DCRI was conceived as a fortress to fight against 'big' transnational, organised terrorism.”
Enlargement : Illustration 4
Marc Trévidic agrees. “Before 2001, we had to combat terrorist groups who had built up networks to take people to Afghanistan,” he explained during his parliamentary hearing. “In this context our very centralised system was ideal and we were very efficient. As the essential information came from abroad, the DST immediately drew up an official report and we could carry out some effective prosecutions of people who were going to get trained in Al Qaeda camps. But the fusion of the services further reinforced the centralisation of our system just as the situation changed. There are no more travel networks. It's now individuals who leave, and these departures are hard to locate and difficult to manage with a cumbersome and hierarchical system, one conceived in such a way that all the information, even that which comes from the regional units, is sent up to Paris.”
The authors of the report also highlighted the scorn of the DCRI for its local offices, the break with the on-the-ground information-gathering carried out by the RG and the small number of agents in charge of monitoring radical Islam. “The DCRI thinks that it will need to double the number of its Arabic specialists,” notes the report.
Manuel Valls' major project while he was at the ministry of the interior was the reform of the DCRI, and this culminated in early 2014 in the creation of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure (DGSI) an organisation in charge of domestic security that reports directly to the interior minister. This setup will allow the body to have its own budget, diversify its personnel and recruit non police officers, following the example of the organisation it is modelled on, the powerful overseas intelligence agency the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE). In the coming five years the DGSI is due to recruit 430 civilians, analysts, interpreters, IT experts and researchers.
But even this reform did not enable the new DGSI to thwart the plans of the principal suspect in the Brussels shootings in time. “The mass of information to deal with exceeds normal capacities and requires a quantitative and technological leap,” says Emmanuel Roux, secretary general of the national union of police superintendents the SCPN. “But do the public want a police state?”
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The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter.