The mood in many classrooms and teachers’ rooms in France was sombre on the last day before the usual two-week autumn break. A week earlier, on October 13, one of them, French teacher Dominique Bernard, was stabbed to death at his high school, Gambetta-Carnot, in the northern city of Arras. The attacker’s name was Mohamed Mogouchkov, he was originally from the Russian Caucasus and was a student at the same institute. “I’ve always known teachers’ rooms where there was a certain lightness and a certain laughter, and now you feel the gravity or the absence of lightness,” says Iannis Roder, a veteran history and geography teacher in a northern suburb of Paris. “It’s as if something rests on the shoulders of each of us.”
For many, like Roder, Bernard’s murder immediately brought back memories of the beheading three years earlier of Samuel Paty, a professor of history and geography who, in a lecture on the limits of freedom of expression, had pointed out some of the famous caricatures of Mohammed in the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Three days after the murder in Arras, Abdesalem Lassoued, a 45-year-old Tunisian, shot dead two Swedish citizens in Brussels, allegedly to take revenge for the burning of copies of the Koran in Sweden in previous months.
Is jihadism returning? Coinciding with the escalation of the war in the Middle East, and although the connection to these latest attacks is unclear, there is fear of new episodes in Europe.
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“There is an enormous risk that the terrorist threat linked to the conflict will increase,” EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson said in an interview in Brussels this week with EL PAÍS and other media. “There may be terrorists coming to the European Union, but the biggest risk is that the people who are here and are already radicalized could carry out attacks.”
Experts are wondering whether we can speak of a new wave of terror in Europe. “It is still too early to speak of a return of the high tide of jihadism,” answers political scientist and Arabist Hugo Micheron, professor at the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po, in a conversation with a group of correspondents. “The majority of the European jihadist movement has not yet become active. “With the recent attacks we are dealing with people on the fringes of the movement.”
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Micheron has just published Anger and Forgetting, an ambitious history of European jihadism, in French. The essay describes how an ideology born in the Hindu Kush mountains spread over the past three decades, drawing 6,000 Europeans to fight in Syria in the last decade. And he explains how Islamist-rooted violence in Europe has experienced alternative phases of expansion and retreat, or, as he calls it, “high tides” and “ebb tides”.
Floods are the times of the deadliest attacks: the mid-1990s in France, the mid-1990s in Madrid or London, or the mid-2010s in France, Germany or Spain. At low tide, however, jihadism appears defeated and in disarray, but according to Micheron it would be a mistake to believe that the threat has disappeared. For him, it is simply no longer about destabilizing hostile societies, but about an ideological rearmament with targeted attacks, which is no longer organized on a large scale.
Image of the van from the 2017 attack on Las Ramblas in Barcelona. Quique García ((EPA) EFE)
“Even at low tide, we have hundreds of European jihadist sympathizers capable of responding to calls from Daesh [Estado Islámico], Al-Qaeda or now from Hamas, and we see very serious passages in fact, which is a peculiarity of the current situation,” says Micheron. “This is a sign of the jihadist dynamic in Europe, of its strength rather than its weakness.”
And then? “There are two ways to look at it,” he replies. “One is that the high and low tides are fairly regular and there is a peak in the middle of the decade every time. With this plan, we risk seeing a peak in the mid-2020s with a potentially intense terror campaign. And that is why we must be extremely vigilant about the inflammatory potential of the Middle East crisis. The other view is to consider that jihadist groups do not currently have the same operational capabilities as Daesh and that we will continue to carry out attacks here and there without the jihadist movement being able to organize and coordinate, to strike.”
Olivier Roy, professor at the European University Institute in Florence and author of, among other things, “Jihad and Death,” affirms: “Hamas will not carry out terrorism in Europe. They’ve never done it before. They are territorial. The reconquest of Palestine belongs to them. “Those who carried out attacks on European territory in the 1970s and 1980s were the Palestinian leftists.” But he adds: “Iran carried out attacks in Europe. It would surprise me that he would agree to this, but anything is possible. What is most likely is that there are people like those who have been operating since 2016 and who identify themselves as Gaza’s avengers.”
The profile of these “Avengers” would fit that of the recent attacks, carried out, in Roy’s words, by “relatively isolated,” “floating,” “unanchored” types. “There is no return [del yihadismo]“But a continuity,” says the specialist who is critical of Micheron’s theory of high tides and ebbs: “The high tide implies a regularity, but there is absolutely nothing that allows us to say that there is a regularity in the return of the wave of terror. ” ” .
“The attacks,” he adds, “are less spectacular because the defeat of Daesh has significantly strangled the logistical networks.” And above all, the attacks between 1995 and 2015 were largely carried out by members of the second generation [de la inmigración]. It turns out that they are now 40 years old and the grandchildren of the third generation, the grandchildren of immigrants, do not participate in terrorism.” The case of terrorists from Chechnya, like the young man who beheaded Paty, or Ingushetia, like the one who stabbed Professor Bernard is different. They belong to the second generation, where there are uprooted and lonely young people who are more willing to take action.
The Arras terrorist declared in a recording his “hatred of France, of the French, of democracy”. According to the newspaper Le Monde, Mogouchkov said: “I was in your schools for years, I lived among you for years, you taught me what democracy and human rights are, you drove me to hell.”
School again. “Teachers are becoming aware that they are potential targets,” says Iannis Roder, who, in addition to his work as a teacher in a northern suburb of Paris, also runs the Jean Jaurès Foundation’s educational observatory. Paty’s murder was “a shock,” said this teacher. Bernards is a confirmation. They already knew it could happen again. That’s why “the shock is now less, but the concern is deeper.” Roder explains that some colleagues might say that Paty was beheaded for a reason, however perverse: to show the caricatures of Muhammad; In Bertrand’s case, he was stabbed because he was what he was. A teacher.
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