The 9/11 Wars (115 page)

  
55
.
French Government Centre of Strategic Analysis,
Enquêtes sur les violences urbaines
, pp. 17, 25.

  
56
.
Ibid., p. 47.

  
57
.
Jean Chichizola, ‘Fous d’Allah et voyous font cause commune sur les braquages’,
Le Figaro
, January 13, 2006.

  
58
.
One report by the RG detailed sixty-eight of 128 French penal institutions ‘contaminated by Islamism’. Jean Chichizola, ‘175 Islamistes font du proselytisme en prison’,
Le Figaro
, January 13, 2006. One reason for the radicalization activities occurring outside mosques and Islamic centres was the extremely effective surveillance of such locations by French intelligence services. Text of DGSE confidential presentation, Paris, March 2009, author collection.

  
59
.
Netherlands Institute for International Relations Clingendael (Edwin Bakker and Teije Hidde Donker),
Jihadi Terrorists in Europe,
The Hague, December 2006.

  
60
.
Author interview with DST official, Paris, January 2009. Jean Chichizola, ‘L’Ombre de Zarqaoui s’étend jusqu’en France’,
Le Figaro
, December 14, 2005. Atmane Tazaghart and Roland Jacquard, ‘La France en ligne de mire’,
Le Figaro
Magazine, November 5, 2005. Patricia Tourancheau, ‘La “Menace majeure” gagne du terrain’,
Libération
, July 9, 2005. A series of arrests stopped a few score more. ‘Les Djihadistes de banlieue s’apprêtaient à partir en Irak’,
Le Figaro
, September 20, 2005.

  
61
.
Author interview with DGSE officer, Paris, January 2007. Eric Pelletier and Jean-Marie Pontaut, ‘Islamisme, des étudiants sous surveillance’,
L’Express
, November 9, 2006. The numbers of genuine militants remained in more or less the same very low relative proportions as regards the rest of the Muslim population as in the UK. Indeed, it is likely they were probably even lower. However, with a steady stream of plots uncovered through 2004 and 2005, senior officials, like those of almost every security service more or less everywhere from Indonesia to California, went on the record repeatedly in the aftermath of the London bombings and on through the rest of the year to say that the question of an attack in France was a matter not of ‘if’ but of ‘when’. ‘We face a tide which we cannot hold back. Despite all the international community’s efforts they are capable of striking in Bali, in London and pretty much at any time,’ said Christophe Chaboud, director of the French government’s counter-terrorism coordinating body, Uclat. ‘Le Chef de l’antiterrorisme craint “une lame de fond” ’, VSD, December 28, 2005.

  
62
.
Author interview with senior official, DST, Riyadh, April 2008.

  
63
.
Ibid. Author interview with Alain Bauer, criminologist and presidential adviser, Observatoire national de la délinquance, Paris, November 2009.

  
64
.
Author interview with senior official, DGSE, Paris, June 2008.

  
65
.
France’s major Muslim authorities – such as the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Union of French Islamic Organizations (UIOF) – made repeated calls for the rioting to cease but were resolutely ignored. This failure revealed what many had suspected for some time: that the older generation of political Islamist leaders had little connection with the youth of the
banlieues
.

  
66
.
Author interview, Paris, September 2005.

  
67
.
The term is from Laurence and Vaisse,
Intégrer l’Islam
, p. 54.

  
68
.
Beyond the ramparts was for a long period known as
la zone
, a hinterland of vagrancy, poverty, promiscuity and violence from where gangs were said to come to threaten the urban population.

  
69
.
I.e. with a monthly revenue of less than €908. Luc Bronner, ‘Zones urbaines sensibles: près d’un mineur sur deux connaît la pauvreté’,
Le Monde
, December 1, 2009.

  
70
.
Laurence and Vaisse,
Intégrer l’Islam
, p. 56.

  
71
.
Statistics from the Institut National de statistiques economiques,
www.Insee.fr
.

  
72
.
As shown by the 2007 film
La Classe
.

  
73
.
F. Lainé and M. Okba, ‘Jeunes de parents immigrés: de l’école au métier’,
Travail et Emploi
, 103, 2005, pp. 79–83.

  
74
.
Author collection.

  
75
.
A brief experiment with ‘
police de proximité
’ was ended in 2002 by the then minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, who said that officers had better things to do than ‘play football’.

  
76
.
Though one can push the parallels too far, accompanying French police in the weeks following the violence of September 2005 was reminiscent of similar experiences with coalition forces on patrol in Afghanistan and, particularly, Iraq. There was the same banter and solidarity among those on patrol, the same undercurrent of sullen resentment and mutual misunderstanding of those being patrolled, the same sense of latent violence and intrusion, the same contest to control territory on the ground. In Iraq it was a strategic street, a market, a bit of wasteland, a dark corner of the local station out of sight of CCTV cameras. In Aulnay, Bobigny and elsewhere it was a bus-stop favoured by dealers, the top floors of an apartment block from which one could see the police coming, a petrol station.

  
77
.
Jason Burke, ‘Voice of the suburbs’,
Observer
, April 23, 2006. Author interview with Faiza Guène, Paris, March 2006, April 2008.

  
78
.
Jason Burke, ‘The baker who joined Elysée elite’,
Observer
, March 23, 2008. ‘It’s all down to hard work. I’ve never suffered any discrimination,’ he said. Author interview with Anis Bouabsa, March 2008.

  
79
.
The canonical vision of French history taught in most schools also offered little room for interrogation by those whose parents remembered the reality of the Algerian war of independence from 1954 to 1962.

  
80
.
One rapper, a favourite with the rioters, spoke in one lyric about how he hoped to throw a
pavé
, the traditional Parisian paving stone that has been iconic to street demonstrations from the 1830s through to 1968, through the windows of shops on the Champs Elysées. He was widely condemned for this call to arms, which was, whatever his critics said, very much part of French cultural tradition rather than being an attack on it. Similarly, when, during the
émeutes
, the specialist public order forces, the Compagnies de Sécurité Républicaines (CRS), were deployed, many of the rioters appeared delighted to have merited the presence of the famously brutal CRS in their neighbourhoods and chanted the very predictable ‘CR … SS’ familiar to almost every serious breakdown of public order in France since 1968. The real significance of their words – the insulting reference to Hitler’s elite military units, concentration camp guards and so on – entirely escaped the rioters – at least those the author spoke to. There may have been some who were more expert in the political and military history of the twentieth century, but they were certainly thin on the ground in Aulnay and Clichy-sous-Bois.

  
81
.
Author telephone interview with Flemming Rose, January 2011

  
82
.
Malik,
From Fatwa to Jihad
, p. 144.

  
83
.
Ibid.

  
84
.
Legal charges brought against
Jyllands-Posten
were eventually dismissed at the beginning of January 2006 on the grounds that the publishing of the cartoons did not violate laws on religious or racial discrimination or on blasphemy.

  
85
.
Author telephone interview with Rose, January 2011.

  
86
.
Pargeter,
The New Frontiers of Jihad
, p. 195.

  
87
.
Ibid., p. 191.

  
88
.
Christian Makarian, ‘Noirs desseins’,
L’Express
, February 9, 2006.

  
89
.
René Backmann and Henri Guirchon, ‘Les dessins de la colère’,
Le Nouvel Observateur
, February 9–15, 2006.

  
90
.
Angela Stephens, ‘Publics in Western countries disapprove of Muhammad cartoons but right to publish widely defended’, February 16, 2006,
www.worldpublicopinion.org
. ‘ “A New Crusade”, bin Laden threatens Europe over Muhammad cartoons’,
Der Spiegel
, March 20, 2008.

  
91
.
Author telephone interview with Rose, January 2011. Anna Badkhen, ‘What’s behind Muslim cartoon outrage?’,
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 11, 2006.

  
92
.
Salah Gaham, a caretaker, died of smoke poisoning while trying to extinguish a fire started in a basement. Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, a retired Peugeot worker, died from head injuries after being reportedly struck by a hooded man in the street after he and a neighbour went to inspect damage to a bin.

  
93
.
For Rice’s remarks at the American University in Cairo see Congressional Record,
Proceedings and Debates of the 109th Session of Congress
, vol. 151, part 10, p. 14,415.

  
94
.
John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed,
Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think
, Gallup Press, 2007, pp. 69–70. Investigative Project on Terrorism, ‘Dalia Mogahed: A Muslim George Gallup or Islamist Ideologue?’, April 5, 2010.

  
95
.
For the head of the UK’s MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Al-Qaeda threat was ‘serious [and] growing’ and would last at least ‘a generation’.

CHAPTER 10: THE AWAKENING

    1
.
According to some sources, they wore Iraqi special forces uniforms.

    2
.
Author interview with senior Iraqi security official, London, August 2006. Some reports mentioned a second Iraqi involved in the bombing. Edward Wong, ‘Iraqi led bombing of Shiite sites, official says’,
New York Times
, June 28, 2006.

    3
.
Post-tour interview with Major Darrel Green, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, February 27, 2007.

    4
.
‘Interview with Maj. Jeremy Lewis’, Combat Studies Institute, February 29, 2007, p. 12. Also quoted by Thomas Ricks,
The Gamble
, Penguin, 2009, p. 32.