Why are they allowed back in? Going to the Islamic State was tantamount to declaring themselves to be at war with France. Isn’t that treason? And if they had to be let back in, why are they roaming around freely making new jihad recruits?
“The town that went to jihad: Fanatics in sleepy French neighbourhood are fighting alongside Islamic State in Syria then coming BACK to radicalise youngsters,” by Jay Akbar, Mailonline, February 7, 2015 (thanks to Bill):
At least 17 men from a small town in southern France have reportedly joined Al-Qaeda or Islamic State to fight in Syria.
Three of the men from Lunel, which has a population of just 27,500, have even taken their wives or girlfriends with them. One of them even gave birth in the war zone.
Six men from the town have died, which accounts for 10 per cent of the French jihadists killed in the conflict, Adam Sage wrote in the Times.
Five people were arrested during anti-terror raids in the Abrivado neighbourhood only last month, according to France 24.
The French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the people arrested – aged between 26 and 44 – were ‘suspected of active involvement in a jihadist network’.
He also claimed the network’s members ‘were recruited and indoctrinated, and who also indoctrinated and recruited several other French youngsters from Lunel’.
The town’s mayor Claude Arnaud had previously doubted the existence of such a network and suspected the men were ‘self-radicalised’ by online propaganda.
Herault regional police office estimated as many as 50 young people had travelled to Iraq and Syria from the Languedoc-Roussillon in which Lunel lies.
Local officials including Mayor Arnaud are struggling to understand why their quiet town has become a source of radicalisation.
It is worrying for country in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January and the hostage situation at a kosher supermarket that followed.
Lunel’s jihadists allegedly attend a Mosque in the town’s suburbs, which the government has described as a ‘hotbed of fundamentalism’.
The Mosque is split between the more fanatically religious followers and opponents of the resident imam, who preaches in Arabic.
A local man who prays at the Mosque said: ‘I told him to his face that we couldn’t understand a word he said, and that we wanted a French imam. He told us that, in that case, we should pray in a room outside the Mosque.’
Some of the worshippers allegedly meet to discuss the suffering caused by the Syrian civil war and encourage people to go there….