For insight into why France is increasingly worried about large sections of its society becoming fertile turf for jihadist recruiters, the southern town of Lunel offers a singular example.
On Tuesday, five people were arrested in Lunel by authorities investigating the departure of about 20 residents from the suburban Montpellier town to join Islamic fighters in Syria.
Since October last year, six have been killed in Syria or Iraq, French authorities said.
Photo: AFP
The relatively large number of jihadist recruits from the small southern town of just 26,000 people has made Lunel an outsized example of the security threat that the entire nation faces — one France became acutely aware of following the terrorist attacks in Paris from Jan. 7 to Jan. 9 that left 17 people dead.
Founded by Jews from Jericho in the first century, Lunel was classified in 2013 as one of the towns where enforcement of law and order has become a priority. Meanwhile, Lunel’s 20 percent unemployment rate is nearly double the national average.
Despite that, the town does not compare particularly badly to most disaffected suburbs surrounding major French cities.
Joblessness in Lunel is below the 25 percent average in most blighted “banlieues” — France’s grim, high-rise suburbs where low-income families (often of immigrant origin) languish amid joblessness, discrimination and simmering social tensions at the margins of mainstream society.
Youth unemployment in many banlieues, which have been hotbeds of recruitment for Syria, is close to 50 percent.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls recently likened the conditions suffered by minorities to South Africa’s apartheid era.
However, if many of the people who left Lunel to wage jihad in the last two years fit the alienated and excluded profile of their nearly 1,400 French peers who have taken the same path, others proved that not all aspiring jihadist recruits are fleeing hopeless situations.
One Lunel recruit was a computer science student, another a mason and yet another a cafe manager. Several left for Syria with their wives and children in tow.
The arrest on Tuesday of five people in the area on suspicion they abetted or organized recruitment might provide clues as to why Lunel has been particularly affected by the jihadist problem.
French Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve said the level of extremist activity in Lunel was in no way different to the threat the rest of France was facing.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Japan’s northeast region late on Monday, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. A tsunami as high as three metres (10 feet) could hit Japan’s northeastern coast after an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.6 occurred offshore at 11:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued for the prefectures of Hokkaido, Aomori and Iwate, and a tsunami of 40cm had been observed at Aomori’s Mutsu Ogawara and Hokkaido’s Urakawa ports before midnight, JMA said. The epicentre of the quake was 80 km (50 miles) off the coast of
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away in the Argentine capital, the unmistakable sound of 2,397 dogs barking — and breaking the unofficial world record for the largest-ever gathering of golden retrievers. Excitement pulsed through Bosques de Palermo, a sprawling park in Buenos Aires, as golden retriever-owners from all over Argentina transformed the park’s grassy expanse into a sea of bright yellow fur. Dog owners of all ages, their clothes covered in dog hair and stained with slobber, plopped down on picnic blankets with their beloved goldens to take in the surreal sight of so many other, exceptionally similar-looking ones.
RSS