We gladly receive and publish this contribution from this community organizer, who effectively frames a highly complex and delicate current issue, which some would like to exploit for their political positions and interests.
A true catastrophe has struck an entire family from Nice: 11 members of the same family are said to have left for Syria to join the “jihad” there. An ordinary Tunisian family who never made the news, including Andréa, a French convert married to someone named Oussama, who took with her their two children aged 4 and 6.
Oussama’s mother and his two twin sisters are also on the journey. The latest traces of the family, whose youngest members are babies of 22 and 6 months, are photos taken in Turkey, leaving behind devastated and heartbroken relatives. A strange journey, which can be interpreted as an initial step toward collective suicide, similar to the followers of the Order of the Solar Temple sect, where the path to deliverance and paradise involves sacrifice. At the time when hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis are fleeing combat zones and persecution to survive and save their children’s lives, others are taking the opposite approach.
In Strasbourg, four French teenagers aged 15 to 17 were intercepted by the police as they were preparing to join the “jihad”, identified because of worrying messages on their Facebook pages glorifying the Islamic State.
A few days ago, Assia, a 15-year-old “blooming” and joyful teenager, left her home in Villefontaine to go on “jihad”. She was found working as a waitress in a bar in Marseille. The young runaway, who threw herself into the arms of her parents who came to fetch her in Marseille after four days on the run, recounted that she had been tempted by jihad at one point after watching videos on the internet, but eventually met people who explained to her that this is not Islam. The suicidal temptation lasts only for a while.
In the cases mentioned, we are far from the profiles of indoctrinated Salafist and jihadist militants. Those who form the bulk of the candidates for jihad are just ordinary people, who have not gone through delinquency and prison with family and social breakdown followed by a phase of ideological radicalization, nor have they undergone weapons training in camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan.
However, pro-jihadists, takfiri terrorists scrutinize the web and social networks with a well-prepared discourse, searching for lost souls, people suffering from mental distress. They are shameless, with a preference for young women aged 15 to 24, to serve the warrior’s rest (jihad nikah).
The recruiters of the “deviant jihad” know the weaknesses and woes of our society; like vultures, they do not hesitate to wrench 15-year-old girls from their parents’ love, exploiting the teenage crisis in a diabolical way to fulfill their desires. They know how to strike a chord with those who find themselves in a situation of identity or spiritual search, in a society plagued by economic and moral crisis, to lead them to join a fight that is not theirs, in the name of a collective ideal where giving or receiving death is the ultimate solution, where the phrase “serving God” is emphasized.
Internet as a propaganda vector and social networks as a means of contact and constant intrusion into the lives of potential victims seem to be the preferred method of action for death recruiters, with their preferred target being young people in adolescent crisis and adults in identity crisis.
by Hamid Soussany
