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Europe
Three Jihadists Sentenced for Plotting Paris Terrorist Attack
2021-02-21
[Breitbart] A Gay Paree court handed out jail terms of between 22 and 30 years to three jihadists after they were found guilty of plotting a terror attack in the French capital in December 2016.

The court handed Strasbourg residents Hicham Makran and his friend Yassine Bousseria 22 and 24 years respectively, and a longer sentence to Moroccan national Hicham El-Hanafi.

The court also ruled that El-Hanafi will be permanently banned from French territory upon the completion of his sentence. All three men will be put on the French terrorist offences register, La Belle Franceinfo reports.

According to the broadcaster, none of the three men reacted as the verdict was read. The defendants have ten days to launch an appeal.

The 2016 arrests were part of the cyber-infiltration operation Ulysses, by La Belle France’s General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), after an informant close to the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
 circles noted that the suspects were attempting to purchase Kalashnikov rifles.

The DGSI used its information to have agents pose as weapons traffickers. The agents told a member of the terror group in the Middle East where the rifles could be picked up, with the Islamic State then passing on the coordinates to the three suspects.

When the men were arrested, the DGSI confirmed that the suspects had in their possession the coordinates from the sting operation.
None of the few articles in our archive about this plot actually name any of them. Fortunately, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point laid it out in 2018:
The Portugal Connection in the Strasbourg-Marseille Islamic State Terrorist Network

Abstract: In November 2016, French authorities arrested seven men in Strasbourg and Marseille on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack in the Gay Paree region. During the following months, a total of 14 people were arrested in five different countries in relation to the plot. The arrests were the result of a large-scale investigation that saw cooperation between Portugal, Spain, La Belle France, Germany, and Morocco. Information obtained by the author from judicial documents and interviews with intelligence and security officials sheds new light on how this network spread throughout Europe; how it was linked in various ways to the Islamic State network behind the November 2015 Gay Paree and March 2016 Brussels attacks; how the network financed itself through credit card fraud; and how it used encrypted communication apps to receive instructions from Syria. Behind it all were two men who entered Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
through Portugal posing as political refugees. With Portugal previously being used as an operational base for the Basque terrorist group ETA, the case raises concerns that countries in which security services are less geared up to confront jihadi terrorism are being used as logistical hubs by Islamic State networks.

On November 21, 2016, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced that a large-scale terrorist attack in the Gay Paree area had been foiled following the arrest of seven men on the night of November 19-20 in the cities of Strasbourg and Marseille.1 Five were kept in jug: Yassine Bousseria, Hicham Makran, Sami Ben Zarroug, and Zacaria M’Hamedi, all Frenchies, were detained in Strasbourg, and Hicham el-Hanafi,2 a Moroccan with a resident permit issued in Portugal that had been previously flagged3 by a partner country, was detained in Marseille.

Initially, public attention was focused on the group of four detained in Strasbourg. According to information provided by Gay Paree prosecutor Francois Molins, two of them had traveled to the border region between The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...Qatar's satrapy in Asia Minor...
 and Syria, and following their return to La Belle France, they received instructions through encrypted communication devices from Syria. "The Strasbourg cell had instructions to get weapons, given by a commander in the Iraq-Syria zone," Mr. Molins said.4 During searches of their apartments, authorities found guns and a 12-page notebook with manuscript references to jihad and the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.5 French police believed they had uncovered a sleeper cell waiting for orders.6

During the following months, however, judicial and intelligence cooperation between several European countries led Sherlocks to revise their thinking. They came to believe that the most important suspect was the man detained in Marseille, Hicham el-Hanafi. Their detailed analysis of his activities, travels, contacts, and finances revealed what seemed to be an undercover network of Islamic State operatives that spread throughout Europe and was financed through a credit-card fraud scheme.7

El-Hanafi, they concluded, had direct contact with previously identified members of the Islamic State’s external operations department as well as links to the network responsible for the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Gay Paree.8 Two years later, he is still awaiting trial.

This article is the result of months of joint investigative reporting by a group of journalists from four European countriesa and is based on thousands of pages of judicial documents, investigative files, interviews with key witnesses, and several counterterrorism and intelligence officials. It reveals how European cooperation led to the dismantling of a network that was preparing an attack in La Belle France, and examines the loose ends that are still under investigation, including the alleged role of Abdesselam Tazi, a mysterious man currently held in Portugal.
Much interesting information about El-Hanafi’s radicalization and travels around the world for ISIS can be seen at the link.
More importantly, they identified his [El-Hanafi’s] contact in Syria: Walid Hamam, 54 a close associate of Boubaker el-Hakim, 55 a senior French-Tunisian Islamic State external attack planner whose subordinatesf helped facilitate the November 2015 Gay Paree attacks.56

From 2015, he [Hamam] was considered a key online recruiter for the Islamic State, focusing mostly on recruiting bandidos hard boyz from the French town of Trappes.63 He was killed by a dronezap in Raqqa on December 4, 2016.64
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Europe
Europe is the new pipeline for jihad
2006-02-11
In the coded language of Lokman Amin Mohammed's smuggling network, fighters and suicide bombers sent to Iraq were called "workers" for "the firm."

When one band of fighters he smuggled from Germany launched its first attack, Mohammed exclaimed in a phone conversation: "They have celebrated their first feast."

Last month, the 33-year-old was sentenced in Munich to seven years in prison for smuggling fighters to and from Iraq, and for membership in "the firm," better known as Ansar al-Islam, an Al Qaeda-linked group responsible for suicide attacks against civilians and U.S. soldiers.

During sentencing, Justice Bernd von Heintschel-Heinegg said Mohammed's goal was to chase out U.S. forces and turn Iraq into "Talibanistan" — a reference to the repressive religious regime of the deposed Afghan rulers. The trial highlighted a growing trend: European Muslims heading to Iraq to fight what they consider a jihad, or holy war.

Security officials estimate dozens of recruitment networks are operating across Europe, their numbers increasing as the conflict drags on.

Since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, hundreds of volunteers have reportedly gone off to fight in Iraq.

An Italian investigator who helped dismantle a Milan-based network told the Toronto Star that it alone had shipped 100 fighters and suicide bombers within months of the invasion.

Recent arrests are another indicator of the scale.

In Spain, 46 people suspected of running recruitment networks have been arrested in the last three months, including one believed to have sent a suicide bomber who killed 19 Italians in Nasiriya in November 2003.

During the same three-month period, 32 people in Belgium have either been arrested or put on trial on similar charges, including the group accused of sending a Belgian woman who blew herself up in an attack against U.S. troops near Baghdad last November.

Recruitment networks have also been identified in Britain, France and the Netherlands.

For a new generation of disaffected European Muslims, Iraq has become what Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya were in decades past — the land of jihad.

"It's quite clear that there is an underground railroad to Iraq from Western Europe," says François Heisbourg, director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research.

"Iraq has replaced Afghanistan in the world of jihadis as the place to be," adds Heisbourg, an expert on terrorism.

The movement so far is a trickle compared with the tens of thousands — mostly from North Africa and the Middle East — who flocked to Afghanistan for the decade-long U.S.-backed war against the Soviet invasion, which ended in 1992. But no one is expecting the Iraq conflict to end any time soon.

Security officials are especially concerned about a potential spike in terrorist activity on European soil when volunteers return home, further radicalized and trained in urban warfare and terrorism.

Jihadis returning from the Afghan campaign fuelled civil wars in Algeria and Yemen, headed violent Islamist groups in Egypt, the Philippines and Kashmir, and eventually formed Al Qaeda. In Europe, they helped turn major cities into logistical support bases for Al Qaeda-linked groups.

Once back in London, Afghan veteran Abu Hamza al-Masri set up the radical Supporters of Sharia group and preached at the Finsbury Park mosque, which inspired "shoe bomber" Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, described as the 20th hijacker for the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

Al-Masri, whose sermons glorified "martyrdom" in Iraq, was sentenced to seven years in jail Tuesday for soliciting murder and stirring racial hatred. Police have denied reports two of the four British suicide bombers who killed 52 people in London last July attended Masri's mosque.

Afghan veterans also led a group of 13 people on trial in Belgium, accused of recruiting fighters for Iraq and giving logistical support to suspects in the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people.

Today's recruits are often European-born youths who feel marginalized by countries that have done little to integrate Europe's 10 million to 15 million Muslims. They perceive these countries as denying a fundamental aspect of their identity — Islam — and see Danish cartoons that denigrate the Prophet Mohammed as only the latest example.

The Iraq war focused their anger while inflaming long-held Muslim grievances about Western foreign policy in the Middle East. The result is a large recruitment pool for radical Islamists.

"One of the things that makes this scary is you don't need to be a terrorist to want to go to Iraq," Heisbourg says. "You're a good Muslim, Iraq is occupied by foreigners and here are these often bright, motivated kids who want to fight the infidel there.

"Going to Iraq is a step in the voyage from Islamic intellectual motivation to active terrorism. It's a way station," Heisbourg says.

Glenn Audenaert, Brussels director of Belgium's federal police, says recruiting most often happens in an ad hoc, almost spontaneous way.

"It's a patchwork of isolated cells that either radicalize themselves or fall under the influence of charismatic characters who gather around mosques," he said in an interview.

Citizens from European countries can easily fly to Syria, or sometimes Iran, and hook up with smugglers to enter Iraq from there, Audenaert adds.

Non-citizens are more likely to use sophisticated networks like Mohammed's in Munich, which provided fake passports, safe houses and transportation.

Mohammed, a Kurd from northern Iraq, smuggled himself into Germany in May 2000. He was denied refugee status but given temporary permission to stay.

A former member of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, the precursor to Ansar, Mohammed began smuggling fighters for the group at the end of 2002, as the Iraq war loomed, says his lawyer, Nicole Hinz.

He travelled across Europe making contacts and raising funds for Ansar. At his trial, he admitted to smuggling eight fighters to the group before his arrest in December 2003, while he himself prepared to join the jihad. Hinz says he's privately admitted to smuggling more volunteers but she won't reveal how many.

He also smuggled Ansar fighters into Europe, including a bomb expert who lost both hands in an explosion and received medical treatment in Britain.

The network used doctored temporary German passports issued to asylum seekers who are allowed to remain in the country for a limited time. Commonly known as "blue jean" passports because of their colour, their identity photos could easily be switched, Hinz says.

Flying with these passports increased the risk of detection, so Mohammed smuggled his fighters by land.

He would take them by taxi to the northern Italian city of Bergamo, and from there to either Bari or Brindisi in the south. A ferry would take the jihadis to Patras in Greece, where trucks would move them to Turkey.

The next stop was Syria or Iran, depending on which country gave them visas, and smugglers there would do the rest.

A less sophisticated jihadi network came to light in France in early 2003.

A French radio station broadcast an interview from inside an Iraq training camp with Boubaker el-Hakim, a French youth who urged his Muslim countrymen to join the coming battle.

"I'm ready to set off dynamite and boom, boom — we kill all the Americans," el-Hakim shouted on the RTL station. "All my brothers over there, come defend Islam."

El-Hakim, 21, was arrested a year later as he tried to re-enter Iraq from Syria. He was extradited to France and awaits trial.

His 19-year-old brother, Redouane, was killed in July 2004, when U.S. troops bombed a suspected insurgency hideout in Falluja. Three months later, another French citizen, Abdelhalim Badjoudj, 18, blew up his car near a U.S. patrol on Baghdad's airport road.

All three had lived in the same Paris neighbourhood and attended the same mosque. Phone taps of their Parisian friends led to the arrest in January 2005 of two would-be jihadis and their suspected recruiter. They are in jail awaiting trials.

One of them is Thamer Bouchnak, 22, arrested on his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca, two days before he planned to head to Iraq. Bouchnak, a French citizen of Tunisian background, was raised in a "very integrated" family and graduated from high school with excellent grades, says his lawyer, Dominique Many.

But he was also unemployed, had been convicted of stealing handbags, and like many young French Muslims, felt rejected by French society, Many adds.

He turned to religion and in early 2004 began attending the Adda'Wa mosque in his neighbourhood. There, he became "fascinated" with the Qur'anic knowledge of Farid Benyettou, a 23-year-old street preacher who lectured to anyone who would listen after daily prayers.

"He suddenly found himself with people who understood him and helped him," Many says. "Benyettou gave him a goal in life. He told him, `Look at what's happening in Iraq. You're a Muslim and what are you doing? You're sitting at home and letting all of this happen.'"

Benyettou, the network's suspected recruiter, is the brother-in-law of Youcef Zemmouri, a convicted member of the Salfist Group for Preaching and Combat, an armed Islamic movement in Algeria, a former French colony. Zemmouri was arrested before the 1998 World Cup in France, suspected of planning an attack on the soccer games.

In no time at all, Bouchnak was considering the rewards of "martyrdom."

"It's incredible that Bouchnak, who grew up in France, went to high school in France, and played soccer in France, actually believes that when he dies he will have 72 virgins in paradise. He's convinced," Many says.

Within a year of meeting Benyettou, Bouchnak withdrew the 8,000 euros he had in his bank account and prepared to fly to Damascus, where a 14-year-old from the same Parisian neighbourhood would pass them to smugglers.

Military-style training to prepare for his trip amounted to studying the picture of an AK-47 rifle and running three laps around a sports stadium, Many says. Bouchnak even bought a return ticket.

"He thought you could go to war for 15 days and then return home to your parents," Many says.

Ten French youths are known to have gone to fight in Iraq via the network, which Many insists wasn't sophisticated. It was a group of friends "egging each other on" to finance their own "adventure" in jihad.

"We've got to look at the root of the problem," he says. "Why are young French people ready to die for a cause that is not theirs?"
Link


Europe
Homegrown hard boyz continue to frighten the Euros
2005-12-09
Yelling into a radio reporter's microphone, the radical French Muslim from a working class neighborhood of Paris urged his friends to join him on the battlefields of Iraq.

"I'm ready to set off dynamite and boom! Boom! We kill all the Americans!" Boubaker el-Hakim cried. "All my brothers over there, come defend Islam!"

That chilling message, in a 2003 interview conducted in Iraq as U.S. troops were preparing to invade, has proven to be an early warning of a worrisome new phenomenon of homegrown militants from Europe heading to Iraq to join the insurgency, driven by anger over the U.S. occupation and what they see as Western attacks on Arabs and Islam.

For officials here fearful that France -- despite its opposition to the Iraq war -- could be one of the next targets for terror, this breed of radicals is especially hard to track because they have no known links to major terror figures like Osama bin Laden or his al-Qaida network.

Jean-Francois Ricard, one of France's top anti-terrorism judges, told The Associated Press that traveling to Iraq to fight U.S.-led forces has strong appeal among Muslims here and that recruitment chains are popping up all the time.

"We are constantly finding them," Ricard said. He estimated that "dozens" of such networks are operating across Europe.

This year, French authorities have dismantled at least four suspected feeder cells -- code-named after their ringleaders, aims or locations: They included the "Afghan veteran" cell, the "forger" cell and the "19th arrondissement" cell -- named for the 19th district of northeastern Paris where el-Hakim came from.

Recruits hoped to fight U.S. and Iraqi troops or learn how to carry out terror attacks elsewhere, Ricard said.
He and other officials at the forefront of France's fight against terrorism worry that battle-hardened youths will develop contacts and know-how in Iraq's insurgency -- and come back ready to wage war in Europe.

French militants have died in suicide bombings in Iraq, others in gunbattles. Some are in prison, caught before they could carry out attacks. Some are feared to have returned home.
Among the jihadists are teenagers, barely out of school, who drift into the orbit of older and sometimes charismatic recruiters. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has said that one network included a militant just 14 years old.

Seven French citizens have died after joining up with insurgents in Iraq, two of them in suicide bombings, and at least 13 others are still there and likely still fighting, the head of France's domestic intelligence agency, Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, said in November.

He and others have also expressed concerns that the most extreme of the marginalized youths who led three weeks of rioting and arson attacks in depressed French suburbs in October-November might gravitate toward violent Islam to vent their frustrations.
A recurrent pattern in cells that have already come to light is that of young Muslims drawn to a veteran militant -- some of them met in prison -- or a perceived Islamic guru.

Before they leave for Iraq, their parents, friends or girlfriends often notice changes in behavior: Growing beards, wearing Muslim skullcaps or flowing robes, changing or limiting their diets. Often, a stoic and pious approach to life sets in.
Christophe Chaboud, head of France's interagency anti-terrorism unit, said European youths who have no police records or problems getting passports could offer a useful tool for terror groups.

With European travel papers, which let them cross borders easily, "they have the profile for terror networks of exporting their action into these countries," he told AP.

Militants leaving France often say they're off to study Islam and Arabic, notably in Syria. Once there, handlers teach them basic Arabic phrases or give them local clothing to help them blend in and cross the border into Iraq, officials say.
In Europe, Islamic militancy has spread beyond a traditional base among youths of North African descent. Muriel Degauque, a Roman Catholic-born Belgian who converted to Islam after marrying an Algerian, blew herself up near a U.S. military patrol in Iraq on Nov. 9. She is said to be the first Western woman to die in jihad, or holy war.

Among France's Muslim population of about 5 million -- Western Europe's largest -- 5,000 embrace extremist Islam, according to the police's Renseignements Generaux intelligence agency. It says that of those radicals, 400 are converts. Recruitment is "in full swing, and worrying us," agency chief Pascal Mailhos said in a rare recent interview with the newspaper Le Monde.
The so-called "Afghan" cell was led by Said Hatim -- alias Said al-Maghrebi -- who fought against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, according to news reports. Police sweeps in Paris and southern Marseille dismantled the group in April.

The "forger cell" was formed around a convicted militant who fought in Algeria's Islamic insurgency in the 1990s. Its alleged strategy was to produce false papers for recruits to go to Iraq.
The largest -- the "19th arrondissement network" -- grew around a young kaffiyeh-wearing street preacher, Farid Benyettou. He apparently gained radical street credibility by virtue of his brother-in-law, Youcef Zemmouri, a convicted member of an Algerian insurgency movement who was arrested in a sweep of ahead of the 1998 World Cup in France.

Officials believe Benyettou recruited about 10 neighborhood youths to leave for Iraq via Syria, including el-Hakim. In the radio interview with RTL, conducted in an Iraqi training camp, el-Hakim specifically mentioned Benyettou -- calling him by his nickname, Abu Abdallah.

In the end, el-Hakim, now 21, did not blow himself up. He was captured by Syrian police in September last year while trying to cross into Iraq. He was extradited and jailed in France this summer, and now awaits trial on terrorism-related charges.
Another alleged member of the group, Peter Cherif, 22, is one of three French militants said by officials to be in U.S. custody in Iraq. He was detained in December in Fallujah and, according to his mother, has been held at Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

In a telephone interview, the mother said her son was "roped into learning Islam" and "abused" by his group of friends that included Benyettou.

"It is all done in the lone goal of using these youths to destroy themselves," Myriam Cherif said. "My son was brainwashed. This is just like a sect."
Link


Europe
France detains alleged extremist expelled from Syria
2005-06-05
French police have arrested a suspected radical, expelled on Tuesday from Syria, and placed him under formal judicial investigation, legal sources said Saturday. Boubaker el-Hakim, 21, who is of Tunisian origin and comes from eastern Paris, is the brother of Redouane, 19, who was killed in Iraq in July 2004.
Even better. The revolving door approach doesn't work when you're dead...
He is under investigation for "conspiracy relating to a terrorist enterprise" by anti-terrorist judge Jean-Francois Ricard, in particular in respect of links with Iraq. Police say he knew Farid Benyettou, detained in Paris in January and alleged to be the spritual leader and recruiter of a group of young Parisians seeking to carry out holy war in Iraq. Hakim is known to have visited Syria in 2002 to study Islam and to have returned the following year at the time of the overthrow of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. In 2004 he made a further visit but was arrested in September while trying to cross into Iraq without a passport. In addition to Hakim's brother, two young Frenchmen who attended a mosque in eastern Paris regularly visited by Hakim are known to have died fighting in Iraq.
And I'm sure we all hope that their exit from this vale of tears was sufficiently spectacular and painful...
Link



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