On 13 November 2015, Paris was shaken by simultaneous terrorist attacks targeting concert-goers at the Bataclan theatre, the crowd outside a football stadium, and diners at a number of nearby restaurants and bars. The ISIS-affiliated attackers, both gunmen and suicide bombers, killed 130 people and injured hundreds more.
Less than a year later, a man drove a truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in the southern city of Nice, killing 86.
In both attacks, the perpetrators had either declared their sympathy with ISIS, or are suspected to have done so. They include French and Belgian nationals or residents, most of Arab descent, with parents from Tunisia, Morocco or Algeria.
A few of them had criminal records, and a few had been to Syria and come back to France; others were known to be decent and peaceful, while some were known for being addicted to alcohol and drugs.
The attacks were not unprecedented; since 2012, France has been subject to terrorist attacks, mostly claimed by ISIS, and mostly committed by French residents and nationals of Arab origins.
With the rise of ISIS, the problem of radicalisation in France has become clear; it ranks second-highest in the number of European countries sending fighters to ISIS territories, and according to government statistics around 1,700 French citizens have joined ISIS since 2014.
Of those around 300 have been killed, and another 300 have returned.
However, it was the 2015 attacks which led the French government to announce a state of emergency, which only came to an end late last year, when it was replaced by an anti-terrorism law.
To the typical visitor, the famous charms of Paris remain vivid, despite the heavy wounds inflicted by the 2015 attacks.
But, as the attacks revealed, underneath the surface of the City of Light, there are boiling questions about integration and community.
Radicalisation in the suburbs
Samy Amimour, 28, was one of the 2015 Bataclan attackers; he grew up in the north-eastern Paris suburb of Drancy.
Others were also from the same city they attacked; Omar Ismail Mostefai, who like Aminour stormed the concert with an assault rifle and was later shot dead by police, was a 29-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origins, and had grown up in the Paris suburb of Courcouronnes.
Many of those French citizens accused of links with ISIS or of links with terrorist attacks originate from the same suburbs; deprived districts that are far from the fairy-tale streets in the centre of Paris, they are marked by high unemployment, poor infrastructure and transport links, and are home to high numbers of migrants and French citizens of non-European descent.
"Three of my friends joined ISIS in the past years, and around 17 from my neighbourhood went too, some of them were killed. The situation is very difficult," Ashraf Ben Ibrahim, a French-Tunisian political science student from the suburb of Sevran, told Ahram Online in Paris.
burqa
A woman wears a burqa as she walks on a street in Saint-Denis, near Paris, April 2, 2010 REUTERS
In Sevran, around 70 percent of the residents are of Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, and Senegal origins.
"Because of the location of the neighbourhood near the airport, many of those who work there live in Sevran,” Ben Ibrahim said.
“It is a populated neighbourhood that lacks services, and around one third of the neighbourhood is unemployed.”
Ben Ibrahim who came to France with his mother in 2000 to study political science, but switched his focus to jihadism in France following the loss of his friends and neighbours to jihad.
In December 2016, two women were banned from entering a bar in the area of Sevran, and secretly videotaped the guys outside the bar telling them that women are not allowed in this bar, as it was not mixed.
The video was broadcast on national TV and provoked outrage, with the international media describing the predominately Muslim areas of France as "no-go zones."
One of the two women from the video is Nadia Remadna, an anti-radicalisation activist who heads a group called the Mothers Brigade, which offers assistance to families to protect their children from being radicalised.
"In Sevran where I used to live, I was banned from entering a bar because I am an Arab, and I am afraid that some neighbourhoods in France will be closed off to the French, or France would turn into Algeria," Remadna, a French citizen of Algerian origins, who lost two of her cousins in Algerian civil war, told Ahram Online.
"It was much easier for the government to put Arab Muslims in the same areas, to keep them away, and only now they feel that it s a problem," she said.
Remadna was born in France, but her father wanted to raise his family the traditional way, and took his family to Algeria for ten years. She nonetheless describes France as “my country.”
Despite the fact that many of French mothers of Arab origins face the challenge of their children getting radicalised, Remadna did not face this problem with her three children.
“We talked about everything, especially religion, and let them decide to do the rituals or not, and that is what I am trying to do with the other children I work with. I taught my kids that they are both French and Algerian," she said.
Remadna founded the Mothers Brigade in June 2014. Working at a school, she started to notice some children being radicalised, and when she tried to raise the alert, nobody paid attention. After that, she established the group.
"We work in fighting radicalisation, especially in the suburbs around Paris,” she said. Her group includes teachers, lawyers, journalists and others work with children and young people in schools, outside schools, and in prisons, as well as mothers whose sons have gone to or want to go to Syria.
The group is on the lookout for unusual behaviour, such as when children do not want to go to school or social events because the genders are mixing. It is then that Remadna and her colleagues start their work, by talking to the mothers and the children.
The urban policies and the gentrification of the 1970s are considered by some as a failure on the part of the French government, as the peripheries now seem like another world, Muriel Domenach, the head of the Inter-ministerial Committee for the Prevention of Delinquency and Radicalisation told Ahram Online.
"Those areas (the suburbs) that were built around Paris to host immigrants as the houses are cheap, and they need to be mixed with the middle class. When poor people are put together they rebel," Domenach said, adding that French President Emmanuel Macron had said recently that he intends to develop these areas.
Domenach points out that although many jihadists do originate from the suburbs, there is much more to these areas than the problem of radicalisation alone, and they have also produced celebrated figures in the arts, cinema and football.
“The situation [of radicalisation] is more complex than the suburbs," she said.
Remadna argues that those who join ISIS are victims, as they are mostly aged between 12-25 years old, and they identify themselves as Muslims, not French citizens. She believes they are not only victims of economic woes but also of personal circumstances. “Radicalisation depends on the people around them, and what they say to them,” she argues.
"The extremists promise young Muslims financial aid, a house, wives, power, which they lack in France, as they are mostly unemployed," Marwan Mohamed, a French sociologist of Moroccan origins told Ahram Online.
Parisian scholar of jihad Hugo Micheron points out that economic marginalisation is a broad problem in France, where there is a high level of unemployment, and agrees that economic issues are used by jihadists to recruit followers and incite against the French state.
Micheron, a PhD candidate who works on the topic of jihad, and who teaches at elite Parisian university Science Po, also argues that jihadists “reject French society” rather than perceiving themselves as victims of it.
"There is a land of jihad in Syria, and in French prisons where the recruitment is articulated,” he says.
“There is a relation between jihad and the suburbs; there are 15- 20 cities that are known for exporting jihadists, like Toulouse, Nîmes, Nice, Lyon, Strasbourg, Lille, and Paris and its suburbs. There is a known terrorist network between northern France and Brussels as well," Micheron said.
The issue is related to the rooted Salafism in France, according to Micheron; those who succumb to jihadism are not crazy or foolish, rather, they are choosing to follow a doctrine and norms that give their life a meaning.
Profiling jihadists
In 2015, the French interior ministry issued guidelines that highlight the potential changes that occur when someone becomes radicalised, including stopping going to school, stopping listening to music and watching television, quitting sports, isolating oneself, changing dress and eating habits, and visiting extremist websites.
"In 2014, Abo Mohamed El-Adnan, an emir from ISIS, broadcast a video to the French telling them that the door is open for hijra [religious migration],” said Ben Ibrahim.
“Come to the land of the caliphate, it is the land of dignity and Islam, whereas now you live in France, the land of injustice. Come with your brothers and built the new state," Ben Ibrahim said.
In one of the videos that Ben Ibrahim has been collecting, two French jihadists, speaking mostly in French, warn that "the soldiers of the Islamic State are everywhere, and that the nightmare has started," and that they are waiting for the orders to kill and slaughter them for insulting the prophet and the emir of the caliphate, inciting French Muslims to kill the "atheists" with any weapon they can find.
Ben Ibrahim said he had interviewed a number of French jihadists in Libya, Syria and Iraq.
“They do not speak Arabic, they are not familiar with the basics of Islam. Even those from Arab origins mostly come from poor suburbs and a low social class. They are usually in the front lines in jihad," Ben Ibrahim said.
"They do not have a specific profile, but I remember one of them saying clearly that he is not Muslim, he is a terrorist," he added.
Micheron, who started his research in 2013, has met 80 French jihadists who have returned from Syria and Iraq. He has met jihadists in French prisons, and Kurdish fighters at the borders of Iraq, and Lebanese jihadists in Jabhat Al-Nusra.
“There are those of French, Moroccan and Algerian origins. There are very simple people and very smart people. There are people who said they will commit attacks in France once they are out of prison, and there are those who denied being jihadists, and there are those who admit being jihadists but would never attack France," Micheron said.
"There are people who believe that ISIS is waging a legitimate war in Syria against the other Islamic groups there; also, there is the pattern of a person who went to prison in a drugs crime and turned into a jihadist; there is a guy who lost his soul, who is a victim of his own life, and found a way out in jihad; and there are some who are changing their past; and some who were successful in life. They are not necessarily poor and unemployed," Micheron added.
