Paris, prison populations, returning jihadists and lapses in security

Today, France has one of the largest Muslim minorities in Europe. French Muslims are also predominantly a social underclass, a legacy of France’s colonial past and indifference to its aftermath. For example, although just 7 to 8 percent of France’s population is Muslim, as much as 70 percent of the prison population is Muslim, a situation that has left a very large number of young French Muslims vulnerable to absorbing radical ideas in prison and out. Within this social landscape, ISIS finds success. France has contributed more foreign fighters to ISIS than any other Western country.

One attacker at the Bataclan concert hall, where the highest number of people were killed, was twenty-nine-year-old Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, a French citizen of Algerian and Portuguese origin from the Paris area. He had a criminal record and had traveled to Syria for a few months between 2013 and 2014—a profile similar to the two Kouachi brothers, also French nationals of Algerian origin living in Paris proper, who had trained with al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen before carrying out the Charlie Hebdoattacks in Paris in January.

Other presumed plotters of Friday’s attacks include two brothers, Salah Abdeslam Salah, twenty-six, who remains at large, and his brother Ibrahim, thirty-one, who detonated a suicide bomb near the Stade de France soccer stadium. Although French citizens, the Abdeslam brothers had been living in Molenbeek, a poor Brussels barrio populated by Arab immigrants. In the last year, weapons from that neighborhood have been linked to Parisian-born Amedy Coulilaby, a thirty-three-year-old of Malian descent who had been a jail buddy of one of the Kouachi brothers and who carried out the lethal January attack on a Kosher supermarket in Paris; and Mehdi Nemmouche, twenty-nine, a French national of Algerian origin who spent a over a year with ISIS in Syria and was responsible for the deadly shootings at the Jewish Museum of Belgium. Another of the Paris suicide bombers, twenty-year-old Bilal Hadfi, was also a French national who fought with the Islamic State before returning to Belgium, which has the highest per capita rate of jihadi volunteers from Europe. Two other Belgians, one of whom was eighteen, were also involved in the Paris attacks, as well as a twenty-seven-year-old Egyptian, Yousef Salahel.