Originally from Ingushetia – a Russian federal republic – the Mogouchkov family arrived in France in 2008. Of Salafist obedience, they settled in Brittany, where they were the subject, in 2014, of an expulsion procedure which will be canceled in particular after the mobilization of refugee aid associations. The parents and their five children then moved to Arras, in Pas-de-Calais. The behavior of certain members of the siblings, who are or have been to school and are passionate about boxing, is of concern. In December 2016, the older brother, Movsar, was reported to the authorities after having made remarks during class legitimizing the attack against the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo. Three years later, he was arrested by the DGSI. The services then suspect him of being responsible for relaying jihadist propaganda online in the context of future attacks. In April 2023, he was sentenced to five years in prison for terrorist conspiracy. For sociologist Jérôme Ferret, co-author, with Farhad Khosrokhavar, of Family and Jihadism (Routledge, 2022, untranslated), this case is an illustration of family socialization through violence. This very particular profile is found among other terrorists, one of the most striking examples of which is that of Mohammed Merah, author of the March 2012 killings in Toulouse and Montauban.
L’Express: In the case of the author of the Arras attack, the siblings – at least the eldest, Movsar – seems to have played a role, if not in his action, at least in his indoctrination. Is this a recurring motif among terrorists?
Jérôme Ferret: It is indeed difficult to be satisfied with generalizing and equivocal variables, such as religion, to explain a passage to a terrorist act. When you are immersed in a world of hatred and political violence, when one of the members of the family has already been socialized to warlike violence, it is obvious that you have a fairly favorable environment for the formation of a violent personality. We can see this with the Arras attacker and the past of his father, who belongs to the generation exposed to the conflicts in Chechnya. I also understand that Mohammed Mogushkov’s father forced his sons to fight until bloody.
Generally speaking, the roles of the father, mother and siblings provide family and emotional support for this type of act with very different combinations. It is a phenomenon that we find with regularity: the perpetrators of terrorist acts often come from unstructured, broken, dysfunctional families. This could be observed during the “V13” trial. [les attentats du vendredi 13 novembre 2015, qui ont frappé] Parisian terraces, Saint-Denis and the Bataclan. Samy Amimour, for example, one of the attackers at the Bataclan, had a painful and traumatic history, as his father reported during his hearing: a close cousin had committed suicide and this constituted a trauma which partly contributed to his religious search. Hence the importance of understanding in detail, when possible, the role of intra-family dynamics, and especially those internal to siblings. The latter are often marked by latent violence: Mohammed Merah’s big brother, for example, released his fighting dog on him to impress him and he could threaten him in return with a weapon. We must therefore go into detail about relationships within siblings, particularly between brothers of the same age and the older brother. When the older brother constitutes a model – as seems to be the case with the Mogouchkov family – the younger brother’s radicalization and action become more likely.
However, not every dysfunctional or broken family produces perpetrators of attacks…
This is not to say that every dysfunctional, fractured or problematic family leads to forms of radicalization. But, when we reverse the hypothesis, this is often the case in “jihadophile” families. It is a “promoting cause”, in the sense of Max Weber. Thus, the act suddenly reveals the outcome of a long process which took place well in advance. We do not self-radicalize by looking at images on the Internet. We go there to seek confirmation of what we already think, an alignment. Mohammed Merah’s story does not begin in March 2012, nor in the months preceding his act. It begins when he is 5 or 6 years old, when he begins to have his first problems with institutions and experiences a very chaotic family life, an unstructured family, whose internal engine is deeply guided by violence. Merah gradually becomes radicalized. step by step through key experiences over a long period of time, well before entering religion.
The common denominator is ultimately less the dysfunctional family than the violence that results from it, or to which the children are exposed.
Violence in the family and competence in violence are contributing variables, and religion alone cannot be enough. We could see this in the case of Abdoullakh Anzorov, the assassin of Samuel Paty: this young man, of Chechen origin – with a family marked by the war – had, for example, attended a rather unusual wrestling club near Toulouse. – who had been in the sights of the intelligence services. Almost every time, we find profiles from families electrified by this type of violence. In the same way, the influence of violence in the family is found in Basque terrorism, little compared with jihadism. In this case too, you have families crossed by structural violence, built in visceral hatred of the “Spanish State”. Everyone is immersed in this ideology and violence is legitimized collectively. There is the big brother who belongs to ETA, the little brother who will participate in street violence in the name of the organization because his big brother was imprisoned… The mother who silently supports, because the son is imprisoned. The father who is silent. Real emotional dynamics are taking place.
But, each time, we find ourselves faced with people who know how to do it, who can do it, who are able to do it, because of their delinquent or family past – here, a possible combatant past of the father. Before talking about ideological radicalization, we already have someone who has real competence in violence. Many “radicalized” people do not take action because they simply do not know how to do it. Look, again, at Merah’s case: he robbed banks and had a history of violent crime. Already, before his action, his profile presented a significant risk outside religion. These are people who have been trained ideologically (in local communities, like Artigat, in Ariège), but firstly in violence through violence, which becomes a skill.
A crucible of violence, the family can also constitute an essential link in the organization of attacks. Can you detail what?
In these “radicalized” family units, there is a dynamic that promotes trust, admiration – Merah was fascinated by his hyperviolent brother-in-law – dependence, loyalty. When an individual plans terrorist action, there must be no moral judgment. Total, absolute, non-judgmental solidarity is necessary. A headlong flight. But who could provide it more than family, or very close friends? It is the relationship between Salah Abdeslam and his big brother, or between Mohamed Abrini – sentenced to thirty years in prison for the Brussels attacks – and his brother. They never would have done this without them. This is also the dynamic with Abdelhamid Abaaoud – accused of being the operational commander of the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris – who is a childhood friend of these siblings. When Abaaoud returns from the Syrian theater, who does he turn to to organize his project? He turns to people he trusts, whom he has known since he was little. For this reason, the family and emotional unit is essential in the organization of terrorist acts. As in mafias, as in large criminal organizations – particularly drug trafficking – there must be absolute solidarity and trust between members.
Doesn’t focusing on these family dynamics contribute to denying the importance of ideology and religious radicalization?
Let us specify that our collective work focuses on very specific families, terrorist cells – Cannes-Torcy, Toulouse-Artigat, Ripoll, in Spain, in particular. We were not interested in cases of radicalization or religious intransigence, which are much broader, but in very limited cases which resulted in violent actions. However, each time, the individuals come from families which pose serious behavioral problems at school, but also in institutions, or in their interactions with the different institutions which take care of them.
It’s not just about talking about family breakdown or parental separation. These are too loose variables. We are looking for something else, a set of clues which, very early on, would allow the different institutions to identify behavior, an appetite for violence. In this type of research, carefully analyzing the family unit and a possible jihadist drift is essential.
In the same way, isn’t it, in some way, “excusing” these authors to present them more as victims of their family units than as people with free will?
The idea is not to excuse but to try to identify probabilities, regularities in these hyperviolent subjectivities. We are trying to get out of the rut of the media and ideologized debate on radicalization by working on a scientific hypothesis to be debated: family dynamics. This is what makes us unique in a field of research where we do not only emphasize the “all religious”. Today, it is regrettable that light is often only shed on this part of the explanation – it is important, but constitutes, in our opinion, only part of the equation and does not take into account the trajectories of long socialization and relationships with institutions such as school or family.
This is why prevention very early on is essential. Faced with these different variables and in particular the importance of violence in the family environment, we should be able to identify the birth of this type of hyperviolent subjectivities. We have a blind spot here by finally putting the monitoring systems in place quite late. The idea is not to protect a reading grid by oversimplifying it. That being said, on the ground, we can clearly see that certain individuals have a rather unique relationship with violence. This is seen in school and other public places. Please note: this is not about naming this or that community, or saying that those who come from it are violent by nature. However, certain family and individual trajectories are more sensitive to it. Through the use of weapons, crime, and combat sports, they have a more socially “naturalized” relationship with violence.