On October 13, 2023, Dominique Bernard, a French teacher at a college in Arras, was stabbed to death. The profile of the alleged perpetrator of the attack, Mohammed Mogouchkov, is striking. The young man, who has pledged allegiance to ISIS, is of Ingush origin, a region bordering Chechnya. Three years earlier, on October 16, Abdoullakh Anzorov, 18, a Russian of Chechen origin, beheaded history professor Samuel Paty near his college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. On May 12, 2018, Khamzat Azimov, 20, attacked passers-by with a knife in Paris, in the Opera district. One dead and four injured to report. This summer, finally, a foiled attack occupied the front pages of the media for a while. An 18-year-old young man from Chechnya was arrested on Friday May 31. He planned an attack around the Geoffroy-Guichard stadium in Saint-Etienne (Loire), during the Olympic Games. The suspect was indicted for terrorist association and imprisoned.
Between 2018 and 2023, at least six planned attacks instigated at least in part by North Caucasians were foiled by the intelligence services. More than 180 members of this community are considered radicalized. Worse: according to information from L’Express, between 2012 and 2023, 17 anti-terrorism procedures involved individuals from the North Caucasian community in France, around forty people in all. Among them, some left for jihadist zones, particularly in Syria. Others were planning attacks. Still others are suspected of having helped finance terrorism. Olivier Christen, prosecutor for the fight against terrorism, tells L’Express that he is currently following “around ten procedures directly or indirectly linked to the North Caucasus”. Little compared to the “532 procedures linked to jihadist terrorism”, but a notable trend for an ultra-minority population in France. According to the intelligence services, the diaspora today is made up of “20,000 to 40,000 individuals”.
On the radars
The risk has long been considered by French anti-terrorism. Shortly after the Arras attack, according to a count by the Minister of the Interior at the time, Gérald Darmanin, the number of S files of Russian nationality stood on October 14, 2023 at “around sixty”. In an October 2020 note, the DGSI was alarmed by the emergence of a “new Chechen generation” – the children of refugees from the wars of the 1990s and 2000s which had marked the region. Inserted into society, these individuals develop an “anti-French discourse, aligned with that of the actors of the endogenous (jihadist) movement”. In February 2016, questioned by the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defense and Armed Forces Committee, Patrick Calvar, then director of the DGSI, explained “that between 7 to 8% of people wishing to leave France for Syria or returning from there are Chechens”. According to statistics put forward by the intelligence services, around 150 North Caucasian individuals were in jihadist networks in Iraq and Syria in 2023.
In this population, intelligence and justice are counting more and more members of the “second generation”, raised in France, in families often marked by war. “Their environment leads to an extremely harsh commitment. In this community, we can note a great aptitude for violence with physical training, a glorification of combat, of the use of weapons,” explains a magistrate specializing in terrorism. As early as 2002, a Chechen network planning to attack the Russian embassy in Paris was dismantled. Nine individuals belonging to the same “operational group”, according to statements from the Ministry of the Interior at the time, intended to “strike Russian targets in France to avenge the elimination of members of the Chechen commando responsible for a hostage-taking in the Moscow theater”, in October 2002. Already at the time, fighters were going to train in Georgia, a country neighboring Chechnya, in a region where the influence of Salafist Islam was becoming increasingly important.
“A deep battle of values”
Unlike their elders, radicalized young people from the diaspora often trade nationalism for religion. “Take the case of Mohammed Mogouchkov, suspect in the assassination of Dominique Bernard, continues the anti-terrorism magistrate. In the profession of faith that he records shortly before taking action, he presents a refusal of the sum of the values which are ours: secularism, diversity, equality between men and women, democracy It is not a question of a simple allegiance to Daesh, this boy has a real jihadist reflection, a profound fight for values.
Some of these Russians are linked to members of the Islamic State in Khorasan, a branch of ISIS active in the Caucasus and Central Asia. This Afghan section of Daesh, for example, claimed responsibility for the attack in Russia on March 22, 2024. Individuals in camouflage clothing burst into a concert hall located in the suburbs of Moscow, in Krasnogorsk, in an attack which left 140 dead. and 300 injured. “The propaganda disseminated by the Islamic State in Khorasan is very professional, it targets young people in particular by using the means and terms of communication to which they are more sensitive. It calls on all French anti-terrorist services , but also from our partners, special attention”, underlines Olivier Christen. The prosecutor notes that if the “radicalization only concerns certain elements of the North Caucasus diaspora and is carried out in a classic manner”, the propaganda “disseminated by the Islamic State in Khorassan plays a specific role, very important moreover, in some of its vectors more specifically target the North Caucasian community.
Unlike Syria, no individual from the North Caucasus targeted by legal proceedings linked to terrorism in France appears to have traveled to the region. “More than questions of generations, we must not underestimate the importance of geographical areas,” points out a former senior official in the intelligence services. Some diasporas are more concerned than others, for the simple reason that the barrier of the language is not there, because people know each other, they tend to follow each other.”
Although identified for a long time, monitoring the radicalization of North Caucasian youth is proving complex. An opaque, very endogamous community, the diaspora remains difficult to penetrate. Especially since there is a language barrier: only eight translators Officials are listed in the directory of sworn translators in France. Added to this is the question of the resources of the intelligence services. “At one point, everything is a question of means and priorities,” continues the former intelligence officer. “We were overwhelmed by people who were leaving for Syria. These individuals were followed, but we did not necessarily give them priority over those who wanted to take action.” The attacks of recent years have shifted the focus of anti-terrorism.
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