Lost boys of Paris fodder for Iraq war

PARIS - The 19th arrondissement (district) is not picture-book Paris. Here you will search in vain for the beautiful squares, historic streets and delightful architecture that draw millions of tourists to the French capital.

Perched on the city's northeastern rim and chopped up by arterial roads and canals, the 19th is big on noise, exhaust pollution, lonely pensioners, young delinquents and broken families, whose council apartments gaze onto the motorway that girds Paris.

Bleak it is, but for Islamist extremists fighting the Americans in Iraq, it is fertile ground.

French investigators believe the 19th arrondissement has been the nexus for a web in which Muslim firebrands preyed on vulnerable young French Arabs, subverting them for the jihadist cause.

From this district alone, three young men have been killed in Iraq in the past eight months, two have been captured by United States forces and 11 others have been arrested by French police.

In their wake are parents and siblings driven to despair by grief, anxiety and bewilderment. In many cases, the last time they saw their loved one was at the airport to see him off on a flight to the Syrian capital to do what they believed was a short course in Koranic studies.

"These are young people born in Paris," says Myriam Cherif, whose only son, Peter, 22, was captured in Fallujah on December 2 and is now being held at Camp Bucca, southern Iraq.

"How on Earth can they strap on an explosives belt and go off with a Kalashnikov in their hand? Most of them do not speak Arabic or have never gone to a country in the Middle East ... It's all to do with indoctrination."

She describes Peter as a nice kid but a bit of a lost soul. He was unemployed, did not have many prospects but hoped for a place on a computer training course. He took up an interest in religion after meeting people at the local mosque, including a preacher of the ultra-orthodox Salafist stream of Islam, who turned Peter into a fanatic.

"Bit by bit, he became cut off from the world - real brainwashing," Cherif told Le Parisien daily.

"My son would get up every day at four o'clock to pray. He virtually stopped sleeping and eventually spent all his time enclosed in his room, where he studied the Koran all the time. They forbade him to watch television.

"Peter used to like video games, cartoons, music. They told him that all these material things were evil. If he complained, they told him the Devil was wielding an influence over him."

Another tortured family is that of Mohammed A., 22, a painter of Tunisian origin.

Initially his father, a retired building worker also called Mohammed, was happy his turbulent boy had found serenity in religion by going to the local mosque.

It was better than being tempted into a life of petty crime, drug-taking and "holding up the wall", a term used to describe the life of bored youngsters in the Paris council estates.

The family scraped together the money to send the son to Damascus last July for a two-month course in Koranic studies. As with Peter Cherif, the young Mohammed was in frequent contact with his family for the first few weeks, and then nothing. There has been no word now for six months.

"I have to find him, whether he is in prison, dead or in Iraq. I don't know anything, it's driving me crazy," his father said.

The suspected recruiting sergeant is Farid Benyettou, a 23-year-old Islamist radical who was arrested in Paris on January 20 on charges of criminal association in connection with a terrorist enterprise.

Benyettou was sent at the age of 16 to live with his sister and brother-in-law, an Algerian Salafist named Youssef Zemmouri. Zemmouri and 15 other members of his organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), were rounded up in May 1998 on suspicion of preparing a terrorist attack timed to coincide with the staging of the football World Cup in France that year. Zemmouri, accused of having played the role of intermediary, was expelled to Algeria last year.

Benyettou came to the notice of the French domestic surveillance agency, the Renseignements Generaux (RG) after taking part in protests against the the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and in a demonstration, in February last year, against plans to outlaw the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in French state schools.

Investigators say he had a sharp eye for spotting alienated young Arabs, nurturing their sense of resentment about their lowly status in French society, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison. He then offered his form of Islam as the solution, fanning the faith with austerity, discipline and group loyalty - a classic recruitment path.

"Fundamentalists make their pitch to urban youth by drawing on the feeling of exclusion, " says the Paris director of the RG, Bruno Laffargue.

"They say, 'Don't try to integrate. Don't forget you're Muslim, not French. Find your roots.' They also exploit the sense of revolt stirred by the Palestinians and the Iraqis."

Two people were arrested at the same time as Benyettou before they could board the Damascus plane. One of them was Thamer Bouchnak, a 22-year-old of Tunisian origin, with a poor educational background and Cherif Kouachi, also 22, a pizza delivery boy.

These and other French recruits were cannon fodder for the jihadist cause.

Bouchnak's weapons training comprised a meeting in a local metro station with a stranger who showed him sketches of a Kalashnikov and gestured with an imaginary weapon as to how to hold the gun, load it and fire it.

As for fitness, the pair did not undergo any military training, just jogged in the local sports ground.

The "network of the 19th arrondissement" is the latest account of undercover recruitment in Europe of foreign fighters for the Iraq War.

Another case, which has gone on trial in Italy, entails a sophisticated operation in which a group, Ansar al-Islam, trained combatants and took them into Iraq via neighbouring Jordan, Syria and Turkey. How far these nebulous organisations are connected, if at all, remains unclear.