THE ULTIMATE TERRORIST FACTORY Are French Prisons Incubating Extremism? by Scott Sayare
REPORT THE ULTIMATE TERRORIST FACTORY Are French prisons incubating extremism? By Scott Sayare n 1995, Kamel Daoudi, a statues in the cliffs at Bamiyan, twenty-one-year-oldI engineer- soaring sixth-century monu- ing student from the suburbs of ments that had been deemed Paris, moved out of his parents’ impermissible idols. This apartment. He had fought with seemed to Daoudi an extrava- his father, an Algerian immi- gant act. “I said to myself, ‘All grant obsessed with the possi- right, have you chosen the bility of his son’s success in right moment to come here?’ ” France, his “acceptance by the He settled in Jalalabad, in system,” in Daoudi’s words. He the east, not far from the Paki- resented his father and, deter- stani border, and joined a small mined to find a different path, but influential Islamist faction took up the ideals of jihad. led, in part, by Beghal. The At a small prayer hall in his group maintained friendly rela- parents’ neighborhood, he met tions with Al Qaeda, but its a group of like-minded men, aims were somewhat different, older Algerians who felt adrift and it remained independent. in their adopted country. “They were very critical of the France seemed to them a place Al Qaeda method, they were of libertine excess, Daoudi said, very critical of big attacks,” and they shared a sense of Daoudi said. “And they had a “having betrayed one’s origins vision that was much more— a bit, one’s values, and of being less violent, let’s say, and more obliged, in order to return to the status possessed a gift for sensing the psycho- strategic.” Beghal’s group ran a grade quo ante, to go twice as far.” Daoudi was logical contours of the people he met.
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