Once Upon a Jihad. Alex Perry

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      Preface: January 2015

      The murder of journalists, cartoonists and police officers at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, and the ensuing events in and around the city, focussed international attention not just on France but also the question of what it is that attracts some people of Muslim heritage (mostly young men, but sometimes young women too) raised in secular, western societies, to take up radical causes and commit criminal, violent acts at home and abroad.

      I researched and wrote this book during the second half of 2014. Publication has been brought forward in response to last week’s events in Paris. The main focus is Ifthekar Jaman, a self-selected British-born enthusiast with no training who travelled to Syria at his own instigation and at his own expense, and died there within a year. There are some similarities between his early life and that of Cherif Kouachi, 32, the French jihadi who, with his 34-year-old brother Said, shot dead 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine in Paris. But in other ways Kouachi conforms more closely to the pattern of a militant proactively recruited and trained by others using techniques, which are also examined in this book.

      Like Ifthekar Jaman, the Kouachis’ parents were immigrants, in this case from Algeria. Like him, too, the brothers were members of a da’wah proselytising group and grew up in a small regional city, in their case, Rennes in Brittany, western France. But unlike Jaman, who came from a stable family, the Kouachi brothers were orphans, raised by foster parents. Cherif was also not a pious boy, as Jaman had been, but an aspiring rapper and, according to his lawyer, more a “pot-smoker from the projects than an Islamist”. “He smokes, drinks, doesn’t sport a beard and has a girlfriend before marriage,” said Vincent Ollivier at Cherif’s first court case for terrorism offences in 2008. Cherif himself told the court: “Before, I was a delinquent.”

      That early history and Cherif’s subsequent embrace of doctrinaire violence fits a well-established progression in which a recruiter targets troubled youngsters and presents righteous Islamist militancy as their salvation. Cherif’s transition took a decade and he made it with the help of a group of Paris jihadis and Farid Benyettou, a young self-styled preacher whose local mosque in the city had ejected him for his radicalism. The 2008 trial followed Cherif’s arrest for attempting to travel to Iraq in 2005. In 2010 he was arrested again, accused of plotting to free Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, an ethnic Algerian who injured 30 people when he set off a bomb in the Paris Metro in 1995. His brother Said was also detained at the time, but after three months the pair were released for lack of evidence. One man jailed in that case was Amedy Coulibaly, who was freed from prison only two months before the Charlie Hebdo attack and who, the day after, killed a policewoman in Paris, then four more people at a Paris supermarket the next day.

      When Cherif was first arrested in 2005, like Ifthekar Jaman he had no military training. The proficiency of the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices – in which the brothers executed 10 people in five minutes after reading out their names, then gunned down two policemen in the street outside, then eluded a massive manhunt for two and a half days – suggest that had changed. Credible reports have one or both of the brothers travelling to Yemen in 2011 to train with al-Qaida in the Arabic Peninsula. But in at least one sense, the Kouachis, Amedy Coulibaly and Ifthekar Jaman were the same. They all anticipated a glorious death. “Farid told me it is written in the scriptures that it’s good to die as a martyr,” Cherif said in court in 2008. “Thanks to Farid’s advice, my doubts evaporated. He provided justification for my coming death.”

      My research uncovered how the binary positions adopted by both the jihadis and the countries increasingly frightened by them, have opened up a chasm of misunderstanding in which the truth has been lost. Both sides tell elaborate myths, about themselves and the world, which make any engagement with the other all but impossible. They speak past each other. It is the purpose of all journalism to pierce the murk, expose the fantasists and elucidate some truth. Mostly that’s a fairly civilised process

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