The initials recur repeatedly in the legal file examined as part of the Paty trial: “HTS”. HTS, for the English acronym of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTC), the organization which led to the overthrow of the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The leader of this group, Mohammed al-Joulani, took charge of the rebel coalition that entered Damascus on the night of Saturday December 7 to Sunday December 8. The organization formed seven years ago in Syria is well known to certain aspiring French jihadists: Abdoullakh Anzorov, killer of Samuel Paty, was linked to at least one of its members. But not only that. This was also the case for two of his friends, Ismaël Gamaev and Louqmane Ingar.
“There is no doubt that what is happening in Idlib is the real jihad where Allah chooses among his servants the Shuhada [NDLR : les brigades des martyrs de l’islam]and the best current group to join is HTC”, he wrote to them during a conversation on Snapchat. Gamaev and Ingar are currently appearing for terrorist criminal conspiracy before the Paris Special Assize Court .
How do you start a gear? In the disastrous chain of events leading to the assassination of Samuel Paty, one date attracts attention. On September 13, 2020, one month and three days before the event, one of the members of the HTC organization is suspected of having published a video reacting to the republication of caricatures of Muhammad in Charlie Hebdo. Faruq Shami (“Faruq the Syrian”), born in Tajikistan, urges “brothers who are in Europe, especially those who are in France”, to carry out acts of violence within a month. He also asks Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechen head of state, “to send brothers to France”. It is not certain whether Abdoullakh Anzorov saw this particular video. But the killer had become aware of the Telegram information channels hosted by the Tajik. And he took Faruq Shami’s instructions literally a little over a month later, beheading the history and geography professor. The two men were also in contact the same day. “I beheaded the teacher, I’m going to wage jihad in France,” declared Abdoullakh Anzorov by voice message. He sends her a photo. “Allah Akbar,” replies Faruq Shami from the Idlib region, cradle of the HTC organization.
“Good faith”
A few days before carrying out his terrorist act, the young man praised the merits of the group in writing to two friends. Ismaël Gamaev, Louqmane Ingar and Abdoullakh Anzorov met on the Internet. They share a conversation on a Snapchat group created by Louqman Ingar at the end of August 2020. In this discussion, soberly titled “Medical student”, the young men discuss in particular “the Muslim religion and the Syrian conflict”. They end up discussing the jihad “in which they all wanted to take part”, indicate the investigators in the summary declaration of intent. Very quickly, several terrorist organizations were mentioned: HTC first – notably through a presentation video sent by Ingar – but also Omar Diaby’s group in Syria, affiliated with Al-Qaeda, as well as the Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus , linked to the Islamic State group. All of this, indicates the national terrorist prosecution in its indictment order “with a view to the design, preparation and execution of projects such as a departure to an occupied zone […] even suicide as a martyr to the detriment of “disbelievers”. Questioned by investigators, Ingar and Gamaev both claimed to be against Daesh and not to be supporters of terrorism.
The two young men nevertheless had a marked interest in the subject, to the point of initiating contacts with members of HTC. Exchanging extensively with Abdoullakh Anzorov, Ismaël Gamaev even “shared with him a plan to leave for Syria for which they were in contact with a member of the HTC group”. This jihadist has the Instagram account “12.7×108” and presented himself on social networks under the nickname “sniper”. Its goal: to provide information on the different passages and means of reaching Syria. During interrogations, Gamaev told investigators that he put Anzorov in contact with him. “It was only on the advice of contacts established in the area informing them of the impossibility of crossing the Turkish-Syrian border” that the two men gave up their project, affirms the office of the investigating judge in charge of the case , in October 2021.
Like Anzorov, Gamaev spoke with Faruq Shami from September 2020. He asked him for advice, tried to find out what was necessary to do to join his organization. To have “good faith”, Shami replies. However, a gray area appears in the legal file concerning the exchanges between the young men and members of the jihadist organization. If, according to his testimony, Ismaël Gamaev exchanged with two different people, the “investigations and information from international cooperation” seem to indicate that the “12.7×108” account was also used by Faruq Shami in September 2020.
Information on “the Iraqi-Syrian zone”
Louqmane Ingar was also in contact with a member of HTC. Between April and September 2020, the nursing student had exchanged on Telegram with a fighter named Zoubair. “I never wanted to pick up a weapon and fight, but before I considered that helping humanitarianally was jihad,” he told investigators. “That was my way of thinking.” The requisitions of the national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office on a request for Ingar’s release in 2021 indicate that the former student “had contact with a member of the HTC, who informed him about the geopolitical situation in the Iraqi-Syrian zone”. Like Gamaev and Anzorov, this information did not encourage him to leave: to investigators, the young man explained that he had thought for a time of leaving for Afghanistan “if the situation became stable again”, because he considered it “impossible” to go to Afghanistan. Syria.
With plans to travel to Syria, Afghanistan, or, in Gamaev’s case, the Caucasus Emirate, the three young men appear to have spent the weeks leading up to the assassination exchanging propaganda videos and thoughts on jihad. on their Snapchat group. Gamaev is particularly virulent: on October 3, 2020, he wrote that “life here below is the prison of the believer and the paradise of the unbeliever”. Four days later, he continued: “It is better to live in greatness for just one day than a century in humiliation.” This message is associated with a photograph “representing a soldier from behind captioned with a phrase in Chechen meaning to take up arms and wage war against the oppressor”. The Russian oppressor: in front of investigators, Gamaev explained that he had spoken about the war in Chechnya and was thinking “of the people who were being persecuted” more than of the Syrian situation.
The Chechen cause
This is where the North Caucasian roots of Anzorov and his comrades come into play. All three became interested in jihad first in the context of the past conflict in their home region. While becoming radicalized, Anzorov kept this war in mind and came into contact with Russian-speaking fighters who had gone to train in Syria. Ingar presents a similar trajectory. Asked about his links with “a certain Zoubair”, he explains that he began to take an interest in the organization after signing an agreement “with the Turks”. “I wondered who they were and where they came from,” he told investigators, claiming to have found his contact with Zoubair “by chance”, during a publication on Facebook: “I I asked questions, I was interested in the situation, but when I talked with him, the enemy was Bashar and the Russians. Rather than the internationalization of sharia, Anzorov’s friend pleads his nationalist interest in the family land. At the time, several North Caucasians had already joined the ranks of HTC. The language barrier does not exist: French people from the North Caucasus can exchange with members of the organization born in the same place, or from Central Asia.
“It is not insignificant that Faruq Shami is Tajik. He speaks Russian: in 1944, Stalin deported more than 500,000 people from the North Caucasus to Central Asia, creating a large Russian-speaking community in the region,” notes Anne. -Clémentine Larroque, historian, specialist in Islamism, who submitted reports to the legal file as part of her work at the general anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office until 2023. Sharing the language, the individuals have the same historical trauma in common. Faced with investigators, Gamaev and Ingar highlight their desire to fight for the liberation of Chechnya, which, since the 2000s, has involved jihadist fighters. “Salafo-jihadist ideology was mixed with the resistance against Russia,” Anne-Clémentine Larroque explained to us in a previous interview in L’Express.
Same language and similar radicalisms: Shami and the “sniper” have arguments to pique the interest of Anzorov and his online friends. Today, however, both Gamaev and Ingar deny having understood their friend’s violent plans. For their part, Vincent Brenghart, Ouadie Elhamamouchi and Colomba Grossi, lawyers for Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui, point out in a press release dated December 9 a gray area in the trial: the absence of Faruq Chami, against whom “the judge investigation has not carried out any investigation aimed at assessing responsibility for the attack.
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