“Security forces raid a small southern town known as one of the recruiting centres that have sent hundreds of French youths to fight in Syria and Iraq.” Lunel is a town of 30,000 and it has sent hundreds of “French youths” — that is, young Muslims who have no allegiance to France at all — to the jihad in Iraq and Syria. Authorities are “worried that the Al-Baraka mosque in Lunel…might have become a centre for jihadist recruitment.” Nah, that couldn’t be — all this has nothing to do with Islam, remember? And the ever-clueless Telegraph emphasizes that by placing into the sentence the phrase “where the unemployment level of 20 per cent is twice the national average,” as if that explains it — young Muslims are joining the jihad because the local McDonald’s wasn’t hiring.
“French police arrest five in anti-jihadist cell raids,” by Rory Mulholland, the Telegraph, January 27, 2015 (thanks to Angry):
Police arrested five men in dawn raids in a town in southern France on suspicion of belonging to a jihadist cell recruiting people to fight alongside Islamist extremists in Iraq and Syria.
Around 20 people from Lunel, a town of around 30,000 inhabitants near Montpellier, have travelled to the Middle East to fight and at least six of them are known to have been killed there since October.
Masked counter-terrorism officers launched their raids at 6am on Tuesday in a building in the centre of the town in an operation overseen by the anti-terror branch of the Paris prosecutor’s office.
Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister, told reporters in Paris that if the suspicions against the five men proved to be correct, “this will be a particularly dangerous and organised cell that has been dismantled”.
Two of the suspects, who were aged between 26 and 44, were thought to have already travelled to Syria, while the others were believed to be planning to embark on jihad abroad, a police source said.
Around 1,400 people living in France have either joined the jihadist cause in the Middle East or are planning to do so, officials say.…
Authorities have said they are worried that the Al-Baraka mosque in Lunel, where the unemployment level of 20 per cent is twice the national average, might have become a centre for jihadist recruitment.
The head of the local Muslim union in December refused to condemn the local residents who left Lunel to join extremists. He said French President François Hollande’s harsh rhetoric against Bashar al-Assad had encouraged young people to go there to fight.