Fabien Clain and the Origins of Islamist Terror in France

Six Years of Syrian Civil War: A French citizen who disappeared into the
wreckage of Assads state now sends operatives home to fight a brutal war with
the West
By Marc Weitzmann
On Sept. 20, 2016, French police announced the arrest of Anne-Diana Clain, 41,
her husband, Mohamed Moujid Amri, and their eldest child, aged 16, at the Paris
Roissy Airport, where they had been repatriated by Turkish police after being
detained at the Turkish-Syrian border. A few days later, the three adults were
charged with terrorist conspiracy and jailed. The familys three younger children
were handed over to social services. They were the last known free members of
the Clain clan, led by Fabien Clain, who disappeared into Syria along with his
wife, children, brother, and sisters in March 2015.
Fabien Clain is considered by French authorities to be one of the main foreign
recruiters for the Islamic State. Even though his role hasnt been clarified
entirely, his name appears in several of the major terror cases that have hit
France, from Mohamed Merahs anti-Semitic murder spree in Toulouse in 2012
to Sid Abdel Ghlams failed attempt to blow up a church in the Villejuif suburb in
2015, to the Nov. 13 massacre of the same year: Clains voice has been identified
on the ISIS video claiming credit for the November 2015 attack in Paris. The
video was recorded in Syria. Clains email address was also found in the
smartphone of Larossi Abdalla, who stabbed to death a couple of police officers
last summer.

As their name indicates, the Clains are converts. They started out as deeply
devout Christians in La Runion Island, a remnant of the French Empire situated
in the Indian Ocean, 585 miles east of Madagascar, and discovered Islam in its
Salafist, violent form only after they came to France. Although no direct,
personal testimony is available, the fragmentary information at our disposal on
Clain and his clan provide some suggestive indications about some of the
conditions and context that might encourage an entire family to turn to
terrorism in France.
The journey, it seems, started at the very end of the 1990s with the marriage
of Fabiens elder sister Anne-Diana Clain to Mohamed Moujid Amri, her second
husband. According to a common practice in Islam, Amri asked Anne Clain to
convert as a condition of the marriage, which she did. At the time, Fabien Clain,
21, a young, tall manhes 6 feet tall and is now said to weigh some 220 pounds
was married to a girlfriend from high school called Mylne Fouk in the city of
Alenon, where hed grown up before the whole family moved to Toulouse.
Dissatisfied with Catholicism, both siblings appear to have been on a spiritual
quest when Fabiens sister converted to Islam.
Sources close to the investigation describe Amri as a Tunisian by birth and an
Islamist by conviction who nonetheless, prior to his arrest last September,
never was involved in terrorist activity. According to the Algerian journalist
Mohamed Sifaoui, who investigated Clain long before he became notorious:
People like Amri put an interesting problem to us. At the time, he simply
activated something in the Clains, he showed a way, a possibility, if you will.
What do you do with people like this, whom you cant really qualify, who are
neither militants nor activists or ideologues, who havent done anything and are
untouchable by law?
Fabien was the first Clain to convert, at the end of 1999, around the time of his
sisters wedding, and everything indicates that he was ecstatic at his choice. He
read extensively and learned Arabic, a language he now speaks fluently. His
influence and enthusiasm were such that in a few weeks, he was able to persuade
his wife, his brother Jean-Michel, sister-in-law Doroth, and their younger
sister to convert. By the beginning of the year 2000, everyone in the Clain
family was no longer Catholic but Muslimor rather, to be exact, Salafist. In
Toulouse, they became known as the Belphegor family because of the niqab the
spouses wore at all time.
I asked the former Salafist preacher Farid Benyettou to describe the influence
of Salafism in France before Sept. 11, when the doctrines that give rise to anti-
Western terror and violence were still obscure to most police and citizens in
France. Barely 21 but looking 15, Farid Benyettou was in the early 2000s a
Wahabi-influenced teacher at the Addawa Mosque in the northeast of Paris,
where he became both the mentor of the Kouachi brothersthe future Charlie-
Hebdo slaughterersand the inspiration for what remains known in France as
the Butte-Chaumont Gang, an amateurish network of would-be jihadists in Iraq
who 10 years later would spawn some of the most dangerous sociopaths of the
terror wave. Photos in the press at the time show Benyettou, a red-and-
white keffiyeh tied up on his head; long hair falling on his shoulders; sunglasses
on his soft, feminine, face; and an Afghan kami covering his bodya holy man,
savage and weak, weird, somewhat impressive in spite, or because, of his obvious
frailty. Benyettou says he deradicalized himself in jail; his internship at La
Salpetrire Hospital, which was part of a reintegration program, was cut short
the day the Charlie-Hebdo/Hypercacher slaughter occurred, as the victims hit
by his ex-disciples were brought into the very hospital unit he was working in. To
my knowledge he hasnt worked since.
Benyettou appeared to me as short man with a sickly white-gray complexion,
uncombed black hair on the neck, and a puny, curly beard at the tip of his chin
trying to counter the childish grace of his facial features. He says that most of
the people he met at the mosque then were youngsters, 12th graders, and they
had experienced some sort of a breakup with the way religion was practiced in
their families. They also had no real respect for the imam in place, whom they
saw as an incompetent man, barely there to perform the prayer. Me, they saw as
a Salafist, and this was just what they wanted to meet and become. Speaking
with them I realized how things had changed since I myself had become
interested in Salafism six years prior only. It had become in the meantime the
main point of reference among these youth. And I mean activist Salafism, the
political one. Preachers and imams who had missed that turn were simply out of
tune.
The Middle East peace process was collapsing, and given the way that the pro-
Arab French press covered it, the French Muslim youth that Benyettou
describes were undoubtedly influenced by this double context. But the Salafist
revolution already in motion in French mosques had, in fact, begun 10 years
earlier. So we must move south, in order to understand the forces that shaped
the Clain familys violent beliefs. More precisely, we need to go to Algeria, where
most of the Frances Muslims come from.
Here, for example, is what Ali Benhadj, one of the leaders of the Islamic
Salvation FrontFront Islamique du Salut, or FISthe party created in Algeria
by the Islamists in the aftermath of the 1988 social riots in the capitalhad to
say in an interview that nicely captures the kind of teachings that were making
their way to France: Democracy is a Greek word imported from the world of
infidels that hides corrupted beliefs and licentious practices. There is no
democracy because the sole source of power is Allah, through the Koran, not the
people. When the people vote against Gods law, it is nothing but a blasphemy
and, in such a case, you must kill them all.
***
In 1991, the year after Benhadj made his statements encouraging the mass
killing of anyone who resisted his idea of political Islam, the FIS presented
candidates in the municipal and congressional elections organized by the Algerian
government. Violent incidents erupted during the campaignunveiled women
randomly attacked in the streets, secular rallies vandalized. FIS rallies were
marked by statements that left no doubt about the FIS program. Our fight is
the fight of Islamic purity against democratic impurity. Democracy is
championed by the West on the pretense of defending freedoms, the freedoms
of the homosexuals, which brought us communism, Marxism and capitalism, all
systems that enslave man, where Islam liberates him, said one leader of the
party, Abdelkader Hachani. Another Islamist star, Mohamedi Sad, claimed that
in order to clean up Algeria and build the Islamic state, we are ready to
liquidate 2 million of its inhabitants. Let us note in passing who Mohamedi Sad
was: Born in 1912, he was both a socialist hero of the Algerian revolution and a
faithful Muslim. In 1942, he had joined the 13th Mountain Division of the
Waffen SS Handschar, the Muslim Nazi legion founded in Croatia by the Grand
Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini.
Civil war erupted in Algeria in the first months of 1992, after the Algerian army
took hold of the country and canceled elections, which it feared FIS would win.
FIS went underground, and began to implement its program of mass killing. It
started with the killing of it they knew no one would stand for, recalls the 60-
year-old Algerian sociologist Mariemme Elie-Lucas, co-founder of the news
website Secularism Is a Womens Issue,, who lived in Algeria during the whole
decade of the 90s. Gay poets, for instance, were among the first victims;
school teachers, especially in small, backward villages, soon followed, she said.
London-based fundamentalist newspapers announced in advance what category
of the population was to be hit and destroyed. One day there were the
journalists, for instance; another day, the artists or the intellectuals. Then it
simply was the women. Now, if your life depends on it, you can stop being a
journalistbut how do you stop being a woman? So women became the main and
the easiest targets.
As the Algerian civil war intensified, special Islamist commandos composed of
veterans of the Afghan war and organized by Osama bin Laden emerged out of
the FIS under the name of Armed Islamist Groups Groupes Islamistes Arms,
or GIA. Under their guidance, terror reached a new scale. Buses were stopped
at Islamic checkpoints and female students were pulled out of their seats and
executed either by bullet or knives; others, sometimes adolescents known for
good results at school, were attacked in their classrooms and had their throats
slit. Indiscriminate collective massacres soon followed. Entire trains were
attacked, and their passengers butchered.
At some point, the frequency as well as the magnitude of the killings in Algeria
reached such a levelone killing every two days, with several dozen victims at
the very least each timethat it becomes almost impossible to describe the
temper of the period in any normal narrative frame. Armies of bearded men
seized entire villages or suburbs and butchered as many of their inhabitants as
possible. Such was the case, for instance, in Benthala, an Algiers suburb that on
Sept. 22, 1997 was entered by 150 armed men. As one survivor testified to the
press: They had lists of names. And as babies, infants and women were being
slaughtered in flood of blood, their neighbors waited their turn in an extreme
state of hysteria and terror. The death toll that time was 300. A death toll of
517 was reached in another massacre three months later in the town of Relisane,
where the victims, half of them women and children, were slaughtered with
knives and axes. The one journalist able to visit the site afterward testified
that babies had been thrown alive against walls and burned in kitchen ovens.
It was during this period that FIS operators popped up on French territory with
the task of setting up Islamist networks to provide weapons, money and future
mujahedeen to the cause. The FIS leader Anouar Haddam came to speak at
rallies in France, calling people from Algerian backgrounds to arms. Expelled
from France in 1994, he was granted political asylum in the United States as a
host of the American Muslim Council, a structure financed, unsurprisingly, by
Saudi Arabia. Kamareddine Kherbane, a co-founder of the FIS, landed in Paris in
1990 straight from Peshawar; Farid Benyettous brother-in-law Youssef
Zemouri, who actually mentored Benyettou through Salafism and was himself a
member of GIA, ended up being arrested in 1998 for plotting an attack against
the soccer World Cup in Paris that year. The Algerian civil war finally ended Feb.
8, 2003, long after an entire generation had been turned toward extremist
doctrines accompanied by the most extreme forms of violence.
In Toulouse, Fabien Clain was in touch with a man named Larbi Moula, who had
settled in France in 1991 as both a member of the GIA and the main head of the
Salafists for the southwest region of France. In 2003, Moula was expelled from
France. In the meantime, though, he introduced Clain to a strange but
determining figure named Olivier Correl, a tall, white-haired, white-bearded man
nicknamed the white shek by the French press, who had been misled by his
name to think he was a French convert.
Corel was, in fact, born in 1946 in Homs, Syria, as Abdel llat al-Dandachi, and
had come to France in 1973 as an official representative of the Muslim
Brothers. France had a long tradition of sheltering political refugees, and when
Hafez al-Assad started his repression against the Brotherhood in Syria in the
early 1980s, al-Dandachi was able to take French nationality. He then changed
his name as a precaution. Soon after, he settled on a farm of the Artigat region
near Toulouse which, with time, would become the center of what the police
would later call the Artigat network.
The encounter between Corel and Clain sometime in 2003 would appear to have
been decisive in the latters embarking on the path of violent jihadism. Clain at
the time was selling religious books in Toulouses Sunday markets. The books
came from Brussels, where they were printed by the Belgian office of the
Islamist World League, a Saudi organization. Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain had
settled in Brussels for a while in the early 2000s in order to get closer to the
Islamist activity that was then boiling in the Belgian capital. They lived close to
Molenbeek, the neighborhood from which 13 years later would come most of the
commando members of the Nov. 13, 2015 massacre in Paris.
Back in Toulouse, Fabien Clain moved into Corels Artigat farm for a while and
started what could be described as the Islamist commune. While Corel kept
proselytizing in mosques where he sometimes served as imam, Fabien Clain
toured the Haute-Garonne region to sell his Salafist books, and the two men
began to organize weekly religious discussions at the Artigat farm. Given the
Iraq War, recruitment was easy, but Corel and Clain were cautious, and did their
work in a semiclandestine fashion. In the discussions they hosted about jihad,
the Iraq War, Israel, and the United States, Clain revealed once more the
charisma he had proved to have when converting his family three years prior.
During this period, under Clains influence, Souad Merah and then Abdelkader
Merahthe sister and brother of the future killer of the children at the Ozar-
Hatorah school of Toulouse in 2012, Mohamed Merahbecame Salafists. This
context is important, in part because it refutes Merahs assertions to the police
after the killings (I read the Koran alone in jail) and the subsequent initial
description of Merah by the police as a lone wolf. It also discredits the
narratives of the left-wing press at the time, for whom Merah simply was a lost
kid and a victim of French social discrimination.
But as always with Islamist networks, things are both more complex and looser
than the stories told by the police and the press. Although he might have gone
to fight in Syria through Corels contacts there, or through Clains contacts in
Brussels, Merah instead left for Waziristan in search of jihadist training with
no real help from the Artigat network. Corel, for one, seem to have found him
too young, too jumpy, and untrustworthy.
Yet Merah kept in touch through email, and once in Waziristan, managed to get
in touch and be received by Moez Garsallaoui, an al-Qaida operator of Tunisian
background who had set up in the Pakistani tribal zones with the goal of
coordinating jihadist networks in Europe. There is no way that such a high-
ranking operator as Garsallaoui would receive and train someone as
inexperienced as Merah without some sort of an introduction. In 2003,
Garsallaoui had married in Brussels Malika el-Aroud, the daughter of Moroccan
migrants in Belgium and the widow of one of the killers of Shah Ahmad Massoud,
the lion of Panjhir. Massouds killing in Afghanistan two days prior to Sept. 11
had been engineered from Molenbeek, Brussels, by Belgians of Moroccan
background at the behest of Osama bin Laden. Given Fabien Clains connection
with Molenbeek, there is reason to believe that Merahs introduction to
Garsalaoui came from Clain. When Merah came back to Toulouse, according to
Mohamed Sifaoui, Fabien Clain came to see him every day until he himself was
arrested.
That arrest came in 2009, when French police decided to dismantle the Artigat
network. Clain went to jail for three years. He was still jailed when Merah began
his killings in March 2012. Freed some weeks later, Clain and his clan then moved
back to Alenon, the city where theyd spent their childhood, while Corel
remained on his farm, where he still lives.
In between, though, Clains name had appeared in connection with another
attack, this time in Cairo, where the clan of six families had moved in 2006 or
2007. In February 2009, a bomb at the souk of Cairo targeted a group of
French high-school students, wounding 24 and killing one. One of the suspects,
Farouk Ben Abbes, mentioned Fabien Clain in the context of a plan for a future
attack against the Bataclan Theatre in Paris, which was then owned by Jews and
seen therefore as a Zionist place.
But after he came out of jail in 2012, traces of Fabien Clain become more
erratic. He was spotted renting a room in Alenon, where several Islamists met
so regularly that the owner of a nearby halal butcher store imagined a regular
gathering of imams. Clains phone number and email address were found on
several terrorists. And his voice was identified on an ISIS video claiming the
November attacks in Paris against the Bataclan.
Fabien Clains voice is, in fact, all that remains of his presence in France. We can
hear it in the encrypted messages sent through the phone messaging app
Telegram in which he allows us to hear the war songs that, as a former amateur
rap singer, he composes and sings in French along with his brother Jean-Michel:
Go forward, go forward with no surrender, ever capitulate
go forward unvanquished warrior
with your sword in your hand
kill all the devils soldiers with no hesitation
Be afraid of nothing in this war
you have everything to win
fight until you meet the Almighty
and run toward your prey like a roaring lion
kill all the apostates that the Devil mislead
With the people of the Fake the war is on
no more polemics no more philosophy
either you kill them or they kill you:
it is all benefit
whoever opposes sharia is lost
even if he claims to be virtuous
so cut off the heads of ignorance
Cut off the heads of the soldiers of wandering.
We will terrorize you
We will slit your throats
To die or to kill
Is the same benefit
The music is soft and entertaining. The scariest part of the song, in fact, is the
sweet, joyful, a capella voices of the two brothers: They could be the voices of
grown-up altar boys. And in a way, they are.
***
Marc Weitzmann last wrote for Tablet magazine about anti-Semitic terror in
France. Read more on the consequences of the Syrian Civil War six years after
its start here. Review Tablets long coverage of the Syrian crisis here.

Marc Weitzmann is the author of 10 books and a regular contributor to Le

Monde. He is the former editor in chief of Les InRockuptibles.