A Second Frenchman Is Identified as Appearing in ISIS Beheading Video

A Second Frenchman Is Identified as Appearing in ISIS Beheading Video

By Dan Bilefsky and Maia de la Baume, The New York Times

19 November 2014

Both were “boys next door” who recently converted to Islam and came under the spell of Islamic jihadists through the Internet. Both were apparently self-radicalized and traveled to Syria on their own. Both turned to the web to promote the Islamic State, with one posting images of a female Kurdish soldier’s severed head on his Twitter profile.

“You Kurds, tell your wives to go back home, to play dolls, otherwise they will end up like this woman,” the post reads.

Now both men, Michaël Dos Santos and Maxime Hauchard, have been identified by the authorities as French recruits who appeared, unmasked, in the prologue of a gruesome Islamic State video leading to the beheading of an American aid worker, Peter Kassig.

The group has often guarded its members’ identities, so the two Frenchmen’s prominent place in the video served both as a reminder of the Islamic State’s success in recruiting disenchanted young Europeans, and as an advertisement seeking even more recruits.

France was consumed by soul-searching Wednesday after French authorities confirmed that Mr. Dos Santos, 22, the Roman Catholic son of Portuguese immigrants from a working-class suburb east of Paris, had been paraded in front of the world as an Islamic State foot soldier.

News media reports buzzed with disturbing entries from his Twitter accounts showing Mr. Dos Santos, a onetime avid soccer fan and dance enthusiast, dressed in combat gear. One of his Twitter posts showed an excerpt from the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, describing it as a “call for jihad.”

Only days earlier, Mr. Hauchard, a middle-class 22-year-old from a village in Normandy in northern France who converted to Islam at 17, was identified as being among a group of executioners, wielding a knife near the neck of one of 18 Syrian prisoners killed in the video.

To some observers here, that both men were recent converts who found meaning in turning their backs on France underscored the country’s failure to offer its young people a sense of hope for the future.

Romain Caillet, an expert on radical Islamist groups, said that the images of the two young converts, with shaggy beards and violent ideology, had brought home to France how everyday citizens with nothing to lose were ripe for radicalism.

He said a growing and vocal minority of recruits to the Islamic State from France were converts to Islam, including from Catholic, atheist or nonreligious families.

“Those who leave are often the most determined ones, or those who have nothing to lose,” Mr. Caillet said. “Many are single, unemployed and have broken ties with their families.”

He added: “The big fishes are often Muslims of North-African descent. But converts play an important role.”

Not least, such converts show that the grievances that have animated radical movements like the Islamic State may be more widely shared and could be used to recruit a broader pool of the discontented.

Experts said the background of Mr. Dos Santos and Mr. Hauchard appeared to fit an alarming pattern in France and across Europe of young people from non-Muslim or nonreligious backgrounds being drawn into the lethal web of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, through a mix of powerful jihadist propaganda videos and adolescent angst.

France is struggling to deal with more than 1,000 citizens who have left or plan to travel to join the ranks of jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq.

The government is so concerned about the consequences of young people becoming radicalized by the Islamic State and returning to France that it approved legislation this month to prevent suspected jihadists from leaving the country. Authorities say the extent to which the law has prevented any would-be jihadists from departing France was unclear. France has joined the United States-led airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and is also waging a propaganda offensive against the group, which claims to represent a caliphate — a state governed by strict Islamic principles.

Mr. Dos Santos, who also went by the name Abu Othman, is believed to have left for Syria in 2013, around the same time as Mr. Hauchard. Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Wednesday that Mr. Dos Santos was “known for being involved in terrorism in Syria” and for his “violent behavior on social networks.”

France 3, the television broadcaster, said Mr. Dos Santos, who was being tracked by French intelligence services, had five Twitter accounts. Mr. Caillet, the Islamic studies expert, follows Mr. Dos Santos on Twitter and said that he had posted photographs of himself dressed as a soldier.

A remaining account was working Wednesday morning but appeared to have been suspended later. It did not contain any personal details, but it did include posts with verses of the Quran and photos of bombings and dead bodies, including the head of the female Kurdish soldier.

Dominique Adenot, the mayor of Champigny-sur-Marne, where Mr. Dos Santos was born and had lived in recent years, said Mr. Dos Santos was the son of Portuguese parents, who were separated. The newspaper Le Monde reported that his mother and grandmother were cleaners.

“He was so kind, so kind — they must have given him drugs,” his grandmother, Maria Dos Santos, told the newspaper, referring to the Islamic State. She said he had become radicalized through a Muslim friend and had begun to grow a beard.

Mr. Adenot told reporters Wednesday that Mr. Dos Santos had become a French citizen in 2009, and had lived with his mother and his younger brother in a ramshackle four-story building. He said there was no radical mosques in Champigny.

But Mr. Caillet, the Islamic expert, said the area where Mr. Dos Santos had lived in Champigny was a “ghetto,” where radical Islamist groups had spread in recent years, ensnaring lost and disenfranchised youths.

News reports said that Mr. Dos Santos had been spotted by French intelligence in 2013 after a police crackdown on Islamic militants. Mr. Dos Santos appeared to have had links with some of the French jihadists arrested in the crackdown, authorities said.

Mr. Hauchard appears to have followed a similar path as Mr. Dos Santos. Born in 1992, Mr. Hauchard lived in Bosc-Roger-en-Roumois, in Normandy, a quiet and middle-class town. He converted to Islam and went to Mauritania twice to study Islam.

This year, Mr. Hauchard described in a Skype interview with BFM television how he had traveled freely to Syria and joined the Islamic State, which “established the laws of Allah on earth.”

“It’s funny because in general people think that we have a sort of guru behind us that fills your head with stuff,” Mr. Hauchard said in the interview from Raqqa, the first Syrian city that fell entirely under rebel control. “But in fact I didn’t meet anyone. I would have loved to meet a brother.”

In the video, Mr. Hauchard spoke from a barracks where he was living with about 40 people, “mostly Arabs,” he said, adding that he was being trained before “leaving for an operation.”

“The personal objective of everybody here is the Shahid,” he said, using the Arabic word for martyr. “It’s the biggest reward.”

On Monday, news reports quoted friends describing Mr. Hauchard as gentle, joyful and a regular mosquegoer. “He was never rebellious,” Philippe Vanheule, the mayor of Bosc-Roger-en-Roumois, told Le Monde.

Mr. Vanheule denied that his town was fertile ground for would-be jihadists. “We have basketball, karaoke, judo, dance,” Mr. Vanheule said. “I don’t think that we have a lost youth here.”

Feautred Image: The authorities said Michaël Dos Santos of France was among the militants seen in a video released by the Islamic State.Creditvia Agence France-Presse /Getty Images


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