Thu, Apr 10, 2008 page9

• France downplays threat

  Some experts warned three years ago that Iraq would be a magnet for radical European Muslims, who would return home as terrorists. Such concerns now appear overblown

  • By Elaine Sciolino / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  After the Paris police smashed a cell suspected of sending insurgents to Iraq early in 2005, French authorities predicted a new and dangerous threat: young Muslims lured to the Iraqi battlefields who would return, radicalized, to use their newfound battlefield skills in terrorist acts inside France.

  Dominique de Villepin, then the interior minister, singled out the cell in a speech two months later as proof of a risk that Iraqi-trained jihadists would "come back to France, armed with their experience, to carry out attacks."

  Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, France's senior counterterrorism magistrate at the time, later warned that Iraq was a "black hole sucking up all the elements located in Europe."

  

  ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

  Some of them were coming back to Europe, he said, and some of those were armed with chemical and biological weapons training.

  Now, as members of the cell are awaiting a verdict in their case, French and other European intelligence and law enforcement officials are saying those fears appear to be overblown. The logistical challenges and expense of reaching Iraq has been one deterrent, they said, particularly with Syria's episodic efforts to halt the use of its territory as a transit route. Compared with the thousands of European Muslims who joined the fight in Afghanistan in the 1990s through organized networks in Britain, the number of fighters going to Iraq has been extremely small, senior French intelligence officials say.

  Another factor, the officials say, is that Iraqi insurgents currently neither need nor welcome European Muslims who lack military training and good Arabic-language skills - except if they are willing to conduct suicide missions.

  The nature of the battle has also changed, making Iraq an alien destination for many would-be insurgents. The fight in Iraq is no longer just a jihad against foreign occupiers, but also a confusing civil war pitting Muslim against Muslim. Many young people have family and ethnic ties to Pakistan or North Africa, making those places more attractive destinations, and further advancing those regions' potential for recruiting and radicalizing young Muslims.

  "At the moment, the major threat to Europe is coming from elsewhere - Pakistan, Afghanistan and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb," a terrorist organization based in North Africa, said Bruguiere, who now works for the EU investigating terrorist financing.

  He and other law enforcement authorities, particularly in countries like France, Italy and Spain, say they are convinced that their sweeping legal authority to eavesdrop, make arrests, hold suspects for long periods of time and win convictions on the vague charge of association with a terrorist enterprise has made it easier to take preventive action.

  "It's impossible to give numbers, but fewer young people are leaving Italy and other European countries to wage jihad in Iraq," said Armando Spataro, Italy's senior counterterrorism magistrate. "I'm convinced part of the reason is that we've been successful in arresting and prosecuting people, even before they go to Iraq."

  Even France's domestic intelligence service, the DST, has altered its analysis.

  "It's not easy to get to Iraq, it's expensive and they have no family there," one DST official said. "We haven't seen the waves we expected."

  By contrast, the DST took a more alarmist line when it first authorized the undercover judicial investigation of the Paris group, nicknamed the "19th Arrondissement cell" after the working-class Paris neighborhood where most of the suspects grew up and lived.

  "The return to national territory of jihadists, strongly indoctrinated and trained in the handling of arms and explosives, obviously constitutes a grave threat for the national territory" of France, the DST wrote in a sealed document in July 2004, which was made available to the New York Times.

  The intelligence service argued that the investigation of the 19th Arrondissement cell would provide important evidence of people going to Iraq and "presenting a threat after their return."

  Bruguiere and Spataro and other European law enforcement and intelligence officials emphasized that the Iraq war continued to fuel hatred, extremism and terrorism, and that the danger remained that an individual or group returning from Iraq could carry out a terrorist act inside Europe. In addition, they say, the flow of would-be insurgents to Iraq from several countries throughout the Arab world continues.

  Intelligence and other law enforcement officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

  But the case of the 19th Arrondissement cell captures both the complexity of assessing the terrorist threat posed by the Iraq war and raises questions about sweeping prosecutions of people who may never even have set foot in the country.

  The seven men - five French, one Algerian and one Moroccan, ages 24 to 40 - have been prosecuted as an "association of wrongdoers" with an intent to commit acts of terrorism. The prosecution has asked for sentences of three to eight years; the verdict will be rendered by the middle of next month.

  In sealed court documents and in open testimony presented during the six-day trial that ended last week, prosecutors presented no evidence that any of the men intended to carry out terrorist attacks against France. Their only training in France was jogging in the wooded Buttes-Chaumont park in their neighborhood and minimal consultation of basic weapons manuals.

  Jean-Julien Xavier-Rolai, the lead prosecutor, said that the group sent about a dozen young Frenchmen to fight alongside Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia who was killed in Iraq by a US airstrike in 2006.

  Xavier-Rolai charged that the French group's leader, Farid Benyettou, a 26-year-old janitor-turned-preacher, gave sermons from his apartment calling for jihad in Iraq and justifying suicide bombings.

  Benyettou admitted he had taught that "suicide attacks were legitimate under Islam as part of jihad." In depositions, however, he insisted that he preached that French citizens were forbidden to commit jihad in France.

  "We are in France, we are in France," Benyettou said in his closing argument, adding that "we enjoy a certain number of liberties" and that the laws of France had to be obeyed.

  Only two of the accused actually went to Iraq to fight. One, Boubakeur el-Hakim, gave a damning interview to French radio and television in Baghdad in 2003 in which he exhorted his friends "from the 19th" to join him in suicide missions in Iraq.

  Hakim said one of his tasks was to accompany insurgents as they laid mines, and that on four missions several Americans were killed. The prosecution said there was no evidence that he laid mines himself or killed anyone.

  The other man, Mohamed el-Ayouni, was wounded in a US attack on Fallujah and returned home without his left arm and blinded in one eye. He insisted that he had done only humanitarian work in Iraq; the prosecution had no evidence that he had been a fighter.

  Prosecutors identified another member as a professional counterfeiter who specialized in false passports and identity papers, but they could not prove that he was an extremist.

  Another, Thamer Bouchnak, now a taxi driver, was described by his lawyer as a simple man, and easily swayed. Three more men alleged to be part of the cell were killed in Iraq in 2004.

  Defense lawyers for some of the accused have argued that their clients are "freedom fighters" not unlike the partisans who fought in Spain's civil war. They said a desire to fight in Iraq was logical, given France's opposition to the war and its declarations that a US-led attack would violate international law.
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