Mick Hartley

This piece by Marc Weitzmann – Fabien Clain and the Origins of Islamist Terror in France - describes the increasing influence of Salafist teachings on French Muslim youth during the Nineties, and looks in particular at the story of Fabien Clain, considered by French authorities to be one of the main foreign recruiters for the Islamic State. The main conduit for these radical Islamist teachings was Algeria.

We don't hear much about Algeria now. The brutal civil war against the Islamic Salvation Front was before 9/11, and before the increased concern over the spread of Islamism both in the Middle East and among Muslim youths in the West. It therefore didn't register much in the headlines of the day – at least in the Anglophone press. It was, though, a sign of things to come:

Here…is what Ali Benhadj, one of the leaders of the Islamic Salvation Front—Front Islamique du Salut, or FIS—the party created in Algeria by the Islamists in the aftermath of the 1988 social riots in the capital—had to say in an interview that nicely captures the kind of teachings that were making their way to France: “Democracy is a Greek word imported from the world of infidels that hides corrupted beliefs and licentious practices. There is no democracy because the sole source of power is Allah, through the Koran, not the people. When the people vote against God’s law, it is nothing but a blasphemy and, in such a case, you must kill them all.”

In 1991, the year after Benhadj made his statements encouraging the mass killing of anyone who resisted his idea of political Islam, the FIS presented candidates in the municipal and congressional elections organized by the Algerian government. Violent incidents erupted during the campaign—unveiled women randomly attacked in the streets, secular rallies vandalized. FIS rallies were marked by statements that left no doubt about the FIS program. “Our fight is the fight of Islamic purity against democratic impurity. … Democracy is championed by the West on the pretense of defending freedoms, the freedoms of the homosexuals, which brought us communism, Marxism and capitalism, all systems that enslave man, where Islam liberates him,” said one leader of the party, Abdelkader Hachani. Another Islamist star, Mohamedi Saïd, claimed that “in order to clean up Algeria and build the Islamic state, we are ready to liquidate 2 million of its inhabitants.” Let us note in passing who Mohamedi Saïd was: Born in 1912, he was both a socialist hero of the Algerian revolution and a faithful Muslim. In 1942, he had joined the 13th Mountain Division of the Waffen SS Handschar, the Muslim Nazi legion founded in Croatia by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini.

Civil war erupted in Algeria in the first months of 1992, after the Algerian army took hold of the country and canceled elections, which it feared FIS would win. FIS went underground, and began to implement its program of mass killing. It started with the killing of it they knew no one would stand for, recalls the 60-year-old Algerian sociologist Mariemme Elie-Lucas, co-founder of the news website Secularism Is a Women’s Issue,, who lived in Algeria during the whole decade of the ’90s. “Gay poets, for instance, were among the first victims; school teachers, especially in small, backward villages, soon followed,” she said. “London-based fundamentalist newspapers announced in advance what category of the population was to be hit and destroyed. One day there were ‘the journalists,’ for instance; another day, ‘the artists’ or ‘the intellectuals.’ Then it simply was the women. Now, if your life depends on it, you can stop being a journalist—but how do you stop being a woman? So women became the main and the easiest targets.”

As the Algerian civil war intensified, special Islamist commandos composed of veterans of the Afghan war and organized by Osama bin Laden emerged out of the FIS under the name of Armed Islamist Groups—Groupes Islamistes Armés, or GIA. Under their guidance, terror reached a new scale. Buses were stopped at Islamic checkpoints and female students were pulled out of their seats and executed either by bullet or knives; others, sometimes adolescents known for good results at school, were attacked in their classrooms and had their throats slit. Indiscriminate collective massacres soon followed. Entire trains were attacked, and their passengers butchered.

At some point, the frequency as well as the magnitude of the killings in Algeria reached such a level—one killing every two days, with several dozen victims at the very least each time—that it becomes almost impossible to describe the temper of the period in any normal narrative frame. Armies of bearded men seized entire villages or suburbs and butchered as many of their inhabitants as possible. Such was the case, for instance, in Benthala, an Algiers suburb that on Sept. 22, 1997 was entered by 150 armed men. As one survivor testified to the press: “They had lists of names. And as babies, infants and women were being slaughtered in flood of blood, their neighbors waited their turn in an extreme state of hysteria and terror.” The death toll that time was 300. A death toll of 517 was reached in another massacre three months later in the town of Relisane, where the victims, half of them women and children, were slaughtered with knives and axes. The one journalist able to visit the site afterward testified that babies had been thrown alive against walls and burned in kitchen ovens.

It was during this period that FIS operators popped up on French territory with the task of setting up Islamist networks to provide weapons, money and future mujahedeen to the cause. The FIS leader Anouar Haddam came to speak at rallies in France, calling people from Algerian backgrounds to arms. Expelled from France in 1994, he was granted political asylum in the United States as a host of the American Muslim Council, a structure financed, unsurprisingly, by Saudi Arabia. Kamareddine Kherbane, a co-founder of the FIS, landed in Paris in 1990 straight from Peshawar; Farid Benyettou’s brother-in-law Youssef Zemouri, who actually mentored Benyettou through Salafism and was himself a member of GIA, ended up being arrested in 1998 for plotting an attack against the soccer World Cup in Paris that year. The Algerian civil war finally ended Feb. 8, 2003, long after an entire generation had been turned toward extremist doctrines accompanied by the most extreme forms of violence.