French jihadists: the “inner enemy”, brain-washed teenagers or fighters for democracy in Syria?

My interest in French jihadists started from a short story about two young guys (picture above) of French origin (22 and 30 years old) from Toulouse who had converted into Islam and left their families - without telling anyone - to go to fight in Syria in the ranks of jihadists. They both died in the attacks. The reporter also said that it was not a first time when young French people (not even from immigrant families) became jihadists and went to Syria to fight against Bashar al-Assad. Moreover, just recently Francois Holland admitted that since the war started, about 700 French (including jihadists’ families) went to Syria and about 250 newly-converted French Muslims took an active part in military operations of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and other radical Islamic groups.  

There was nothing super shocking about that story: I mean, in a lot of European countries, there live radicals and extremists. What struck me was the fact that among jihadists who went to Syria there were teenagers or very young people from pureblooded-French families without any family connections to Islam or Middle East. Why would a teenager from a middle-class French family leave his well-to-do European country to go to die in Syria (whose language he doesn’t even speak)? And how would the government deal with this ambiguous situation where its citizens fight again the “dictator” that the French government wants to see overthrown but are supposed to be considered as terrorists when come back to France? So I started a research.

First of all, this problem with a growing interest in radical Islam and jihadism is urgent not only for France. According to different resources, the “French brigade” is a part of the “International Battalion” that is based in the north of Syria, in Azaz, not far from the Turkish border. This battalion also includes other nationalities such as the Belgians, the British, the Germans, etc., but the main part of it are the French. This battalion is known for being one of the cruelest unit of the Free Syrian Army: they cut off the heads of the “infidels” and expose them at the public squares, they make fun of the corpses and make videos of their “fun” (those videos can be easily found in the Internet), etc. As Guillaume Lhotellier notices, Syria became an “amusement park” for young, newly-converted French jihadists who go there to “play war”. Another interesting fact about these international “volunteers” is that most of them don’t know neither Arabic, nor geography or history of the Syrian war and therefore feel marginalized at their arriving to Syria. Moreover, there are proofs that Syrians themselves (even those who fight in the Free Syrian Army) don’t really like these “strangers”.

Let’s come back to the beginning: what makes these young people become jihadists and go die for a freedom of the completely foreign for them country? Most of them are very young (from 15 to 30) and they come from middle/low-class families. They pretty often have problems at school or in their families so they start looking for some other principles and rules to base their life on. For example, Nicolas’s parents (one of the guys from the TV-news story) said he had issues with drugs and police but after converting to Islam all that stopped almost overnight. They become fierce Muslims and jihadists neither after sermons of radical imams in the mosques nor because of the Muslim friends or members of the family. The main resource of the information for these young people is the Internet, social networks such as YouTube (where they can find incredibly convincing and bright promotion videos from Syrian and French jihadists who recruit new people for the “International Battalion”), Facebook and Cheikh Google. Thus, it becomes useless to work with imams in mosques or city communities in order to prevent this “recruitment” and “brain-washing”.

Another important question is what are the aims of those “new” jihadists with French passports? They don’t claim that they fight “against the oppression and dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad” (as the European Union names the objective of the Free Syrian Army's actions). More often they say that war in Syria is the unique opportunity to build the “State of Islam” on the Earth, at the territory that was originated to be the homeland of Islam. Theoretically, they go on a mission of French government to take down Bashar al-Assad government that prevents the development of democracy in Syria. Practically, it’s doubtful that they are going to bring the democracy… On the other side, jihadists sometimes come back to their own country. And that’s how France gets people like Mohamed Mera in Toulouse, people who can’t stop fighting for the sake of the “State of Islam”. Why not to try to build it in France where the government works at the American commands? Why not to try to punish Israel and spoiled West?

Talking more globally, is it true that Islam is getting more and more popular in Europe or it’s just another “canard” that the media created to avoid talking about economic and social problems? There are different opinions. On one hand, there is a stable 9-10% of Muslims (which is not that much) in France and most of them are immigrants from African or Middle Eastern countries. Though, this statistics is from 2011 so probably there is a need for new researches in this field. On the other hand, in any well-to-do society there will be a demand for more strict rules and principles, in the world of huge freedoms (political, social and especially moral) there will be a lot of people feeling lost without seeing certain, solid limits, having certain directions how to behave and what to do. You can smoke, you can drink, you can even take drugs, you can have sex whenever you want, you can actually steal and lie (if you are smart enough to hide it), etc. You have everything and you don't know what exactly you want, you get bored and feel lost. It’s especially urgent topic for young people with embodied personalities who seek for guidelines. Of all big wordl religions, Islam is one of the best ones in giving these strict, solid directions, limits and borders. You don’t just stop smoking and drinking for nothing, you do it because you ARE FORBIDDEN to do it and you get a high score for a good behavior (the only difference with school is that you get it from someone YOU CHOSE YOURSELF). And you are proud of yourself, plus you have principiles you can base you life on.

There is also another side of the question – a deliberate stigmatization of Islam in Europe. The more this religion and culture will be stigmatizes, the more romantic and attractive it will become. A religion of the rebels, of the revolutionists. Everyone says that Islam is bad, and I’ll become Muslim just as a pure protest against the whole world. Typical teenage psychological position – "against the whole world". Thanks to the modern tendency in American and European cinema and literature, we know very well that superheroes fight against the whole world which is evil and spoiled. And here we already start having Muslim Kamala Khan from Marvel and Disney and Burka Avenger from Geo Tez. Why are they worse than Spiderman or Batman? The same idea, the same concept. That’s what these French young jihadists do in Syria: they fight against the “infidel”, spoiled world for the principles of the new, pure, “true” world… Who can judge them for that?

A real magic.

I was 16 when I read this book. One Hundred Years of Solitude. By Gabriel Garcia Marquez. There are books that you create true relations with as if they are real people. You meet them; you like their appearance; you start talking to them to get to know them better; you get interested in them and go for the second date; but you are still careful – you don’t express your opinion and don’t get too close; you even think after the fifth date ‘hum, nothing really special. Talks too much’; you try to do other stuff: work, friends, parties; but one day this person calls you and you are like ‘why not’; you meet again, you talk during the whole night; and next morning after half an hour of sleep you suddenly feel so happy; you realize that it would be unnatural to be without this person; you realize that this person is a part of you.

Those were my relations with this magical world of Colombian solitude. Honestly, I didn’t know anything about Latin America and especially Colombia by then (probably wouldn’t even find it on the map). I was reading the book during the northern summer in my home town and I almost physically felt how the whole world was doomed to the endless rain. Every material object, every drop around me suddenly obtained life, they turned out to have their own paths, their own stories, and they didn’t depend on me anymore. That was a world of sad fairy-tale where people killed each other but it was somehow necessary, where people knew their future but it was somehow natural, where children carried all moral debts of their parents and it was somehow inevitable, where the past visually lived in everyone’s life and it was somehow impossible to fight it. With every page, I was drowning deeper and deeper in the magic world of a soul’s life, of the passion’s sounds, of the wind’s sighs, and of the banana’s dreams. Everything in this world had a philosophical sense but you couldn’t get it with your mind, you can only feel it or feel yourself IN it. It was deeper than any philosophy, any discussion, and any religion. It was a pure life, it was a pure magic.

And it was a pure reality. I found out this yesterday when I started reading Marquez’s memoirs Living to Tell the Tale. All stories he tells there contain real facts but they still have a slight shade of the nostalgia for the past, a slight taste of the solitude, a slight color of the ancestral myth. A phantom of the guy who was killed by Marquez’s grandfather making the family leave the town where they lived, little gold fishes with emerald eyes that Marquez’s grandfather was making every day and never sold them; a massacre of three thousands of banana company strikers at the town square – a story that Marquez heard a million of times when he was a child; and the whole atmosphere of regret for the past and attempts to revive this past that lives on every corner of an abandoned, little town Macondo somewhere on the railroad that leads to nowhere.

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. A real magic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 

Sore point. My Ukraine.

Last May I went to Kiev with my friend for May holidays. On 9^th of May we went to Maidan to see the celebration of the victory in Second World War: there was a beautiful parade and several concerts. There were a lot of flowers and smiles, hugs and tears. All veterans held huge bunches of flowers and air balloons. And people were bringing them more and more. Especially popular were lilies-of-the-valley that are known as May and spring flower. Me and my friend stood close to the stage enjoying beautiful Ukrainian and Russian songs when suddenly a very old veteran with a lot of medals on his chest called me and gave me and my friend all the lilies-of-the-valley that he had in his hands. He smiled and said: “Flowers are for women. We were glad to do it for you. Happy Victory Day!” I didn’t know what to do and what to say because it was THEIR day and they were supposed to be given presents. Me and my friend took flowers, thanked him and hugged him. A little later I noticed that he and his friend, another old veteran with a lot of medals, were giving all the flowers (that people kept giving them to congratulate) to women and girls. It looked so gentlemen-like, so like a real man. This old veteran was most probably Ukrainian, though he spoke perfect Russian. It didn’t matter. For me he was like MY grandfather. All people there, at Maidan felt the same, they were proud of OUR grandfathers and grandmothers who saved OUR country for us. There were no Ukrainians or Russians, there were PEOPLE who had the same roots and the same culture. And it was Kiev.

One might skeptically say that I am not Ukrainian and I never lived in Ukraine, so my Ukrainian last name doesn’t really matter. It’s true, I never lived there and last name doesn’t mean anything for me. But I must say that I grew up partially with Ukrainian culture in my house and I never thought that Ukrainians are different from me. Now I want to say that I don’t want to sound “Russian-imperial”-like or not admitting Ukrainian sovereignty. I am talking exclusively about my personal background and my self-identity. Also I never met Western Ukrainians and I suppose that I might have had a different perception if I would have talked to one. But I want to say that yes, Ukraine is a part of Russia to me! And I love it as much as I love Russia.

My father comes from Don Region, in the south of Russia, where people pretty often use mixed Russian-Ukrainian dialect. I grew up in the North but every summer I was spending at my grandma’s village near Rostov-on-Don. I loved telling everyone that I have Cossack blood in my veins and turned my nose up every time when someone called me “Little Cossack girl” (only later I learnt that Cossack were just one of the groups of the population). My dad sang me Ukrainians song when I was a kid and I remember thinking how beautiful and soft sounded Ukrainian language for me, how these melodies touched my heart as strong as Russian folk songs. That was a sound of my Ukraine.

In Karelia (on the north of Russia) where I grew up, Ukrainian community is on the third place in number after Belarusians and Karelians. We often went to community celebrations and concerts with my dad and those events stayed in my memory with warm-hearted people, bright clothes, sunny smiles, and loud, endless and sincere love. Love to everyone and everything: people, world, sun, life… For me, that was a real image of what we call “Russian soul”, of south, of summer, of happiness. I was a part of it and these people were one big family for me. We sang together, we danced together, we yelled and laughed together. And I have never seen my dad so happy, so “at home”. It was the same feeling as the one that I had in the south of Russia. It was the same heart-openness and unlimited love mixed with a true taste of life (whatever the conditions of life are) that I saw when all my “south” relatives gathered together. That was a feeling of my Ukraine.

When at 12-13 I read Gogol’s (who was Ukrainian, by the way) Taras Bulba (about Ukrainians fighting for their sovereignty and their religion against the Poles, who ruled all Ukraine west of the Dnieper River) all the Ukrainian characters were “us” for me and all the Poles were “them”. It wasn’t because Ukrainian characters were good guys and the Poles were bad. It was because they had the same feelings and principles as me and people around me. It was because they had the same soul and the same heart, and I easily imagined myself being one of them, fighting for MY land. That was a pride of my Ukraine.

I never was much into politics but following events in Ukraine for last ten years I was always impressed by people not being afraid of saying aloud their opinion (something that I wished Russian would do). I knew some information about all the three leaders (Jushenko, Janukovich and Timoshenko) and none of them didn’t really deserve much respect in my eyes. What is happening in Ukraine now actually hurts me as if it would have happened in Russia. I’m not defending any of the sides. I just find unfair and hypocritical that those people who protested on Maidan to say their opinion and fought for their rights a month ago now try to kill and to shut up their own brothers (and our brothers) who try to do exactly the same. And I despise utterly the world community who called the first ones “liberators” and the second ones “terrorists” instead of helping both sides to find a compromise. People of Donbas, Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and other cities who protest again new government don’t want to live in Russia, they want to live in their own country and speak their own language. They want to have a normal life and have the opportunity to choose the way to live themselves. And they are punished for THAT? It’s ridiculous and scary when you hear how people at the barricades in the Eastern Ukraine saying that they don’t have a way back any more: their options are either die here or die in the prison for being accused in “terrorism”. They say they prefer to die while defending their land and their rights…That is a pain of my Ukraine. 

Challenges.

Welcome back to lazy and unmotivated girl. Nothing inspires or excites me: neither books, nor movies. Writing. To keep for records on my computer? French. To keep for records in my mind? Music. To keep for records at my fingers? Sport. To keep for records in my muscles? What do I do it for? That’s the worst part: almost always the most desirable and enjoyable part for me is “the goal”, “the award”, not “the process”. It’s not that I just need to know why I do this or that. No, I need to know that if I jump over this rock, I’ll get something great, something I am longing for. So I put all my efforts in this jump, I do unbelievable job, and I feel happy and satisfied to get a well-deserved reward. There SHOULD be the ENOURMOUS efforts and an AMAZING reward! If one of the components is missed, the whole thing doesn’t make sense. I guess the psychological type “winner” can be an obsession, some kind of a disorder…

Moreover, the reward should be right now, right here, after my enormous efforts to jump over the rock. A blurry goal somewhere in a long-term future – however sparkling and attractive it looks – doesn’t satisfy nor motivates me. I always hated dreaming (hey, it’s useless!), I like planning. People say you can’t get everything right away; you have to go step by step. First of all, who said that? Secondly, even if it’s true to some degree, I need to know exactly how this or that step makes me MUCH closer to my goal. How, where and when. If I don’t get my goal, it, certainly, demotivates me. However, there are two possible ways of the continuation. If I know that it was my fault and I just have to work harder to get my goal, I’ll put twice more efforts to get it. But if I don’t even know whether it was my fault or there is just no way to get my goal this way, and I don’t know how to get the goal the other way, I’ll most probably quit. What can I do, if getting the goal doesn’t depend on me?

Finally, the last (not the least though) part of the trick is challenges. I need them, I urgently need challenges. I need to struggle, to fight, to feel pain in my sore muscles, to have sleepless nights, to clench my teeth, etc. That’s why I love sport: you have to struggle, to suffer, to overcome yourself, your weakness, your limits to get your goal. And this goal is pretty definite: you can see it right away, you can feel it, and you can get your reward for it. So it worth fighting for. 

I’m getting sick of routine, calm life, where you have to work but not a lot, where you get your salary, but every month it's the same (and it doesn’t really depend on how much efforts you put in your job), where you swim just to keep your body in shape, where you cook just because you need to eat something. I need challenges, I need problems, I need enemies, and I need resistance. Someone might say - challenge yourself. It’s easy to say. That’s what I try to do for last 5 years: create challenges to myself. But look at me – I’m now writing this post about myself failing to challenge myself. I guess I need more than just self-recognition. I need to win. There is no point in jumping for me if there is no rock to jump over (or if it’s small) and there is no reward (or if it’s small) after. I need the world of big challenges, big goals and big victories. 

Naturally enough

Man tends to regard the order he lives in as natural. The houses he passes on his way to work seem more like rocks rising out of the earth than like products of human hands. He considers the work he does in his office or factory as essential to the harmonious functioning of the world. The clothes he wears are exactly what they should be, and he laughs at the idea that he might equally well be wearing a Roman toga or medieval armor. <…> He is accustomed to satisfying those of his physiological needs which are considered private as discreetly as possible, without realizing that such a pattern of behavior is not common to all human societies.

Czeslaw Milosz The Captive Mind

 Everyone has his own past, fascinating stories of his own. However, in most cases we don’t consider our stories being something outstanding, something uncommon. I remember this one girl who I worked as a partner with in my creative writing class. The task was to get some story from your partner and to write it down in attractive form. When it was her turn to tell me the story, she shrugged and said: “I’m so sorry, I really would like to tell you something interesting, something thrilling, but… Nothing uncommon ever happened to me. I always had an average life: parents, school, college, friends…”

I was doing my best asking her millions of questions, jumping from one topic to another, trying to discover at least traces of interesting story. We ended up with her memories of her family trip to Sri Lanka, which was not super exciting but that was the best we found for those 15 minutes that we had for interview. And it wasn’t that she had such a boring and banal life that there was nothing to talk about. The point was that she didn’t see her life as being unusual, as unnatural, as being different from anyone else’s.

This thought from Czeslaw Milosz’s book The Captive Mind made me thinking of this human tendency – considering the order he lives as natural. However, the notion natural was created by the human being himself. Nobody knows what is natural, but everyone has his own definition of natural based on the way that the world around him (including himself) lives. When I was back in Russia 5-6 years ago and I was watching typical American movies showing typical American college life, this life order was unnatural for me, it was fascinating because it was different from the life around me. And those movies attracted me by being different from the natural (on my scale) life order. The same thing I noticed here just in the opposite direction: for American students movies or videos about life in Russia (especially, in Russian small towns and villages) seem incredibly interesting and exotic. Mostly, for only one, the same reason – it’s unnatural for them. It’s a little bit sad to realize that this curiosity about other cultures and other countries is based not on the longing to explore the world around, but mostly on this thrilling and arousing adrenaline idea of the dangerous, unexplored unnatural world somewhere overseas. Something new, something unusual sounds much more attractive than old and familiar.

Another sad part of this story is that pretty often we don’t find natural way of living exciting: it’s a routine, something that has always been that way and is not going to ever change. We regard it as inconceivable that the natural order we get used to may suddenly crash and we might be returned to a state of a primitive man. Or that this quiet and peaceful world around might suddenly become a nightmare where brothers are killing their father and each other. Or that this full of parks and national forests region might turn to a desert where we be happy to find a tiny oasis with drinkable water. But the thing is that for some people it is natural life now and they consider our life is unnatural.

It’s a deep philosophical question but what was important for me in this tendency was a writer’s role, a writer’s challenge. A writer should be the exceptional one, who doesn’t have a notion of naturalness, the one who sees everything around as unnatural and therefore attractive and thrilling. The biggest challenge for a writer is to find the way to persuade his readers that natural things are not boring, to find the words to show this unnaturalness of the world that a reader observes every day. It’s about showing the alternative way of looking at familiar things. And that is one of the hardest challenges for a writer. Because he is a human being and his life seems to be so natural and boring if he doesn’t travel a lot and doesn’t write about exceptional discoveries or cruel wars… 

To listen.

-        

-         -  So… only some of us can hear this music?

-        -   No, only some of us listen to it.

This dialogue was the most striking moment of the movie August Rush for me. It was not only about music or beauty of the world around us that we don’t notice so often. It was more than that. I suddenly realized how often I don’t listen, I don’t look, I don’t think. I prefer to say that I don’t hear, I don’t see, I don’t know. That I don’t notice.

When I was studying piano at music school a mandatory part of our program was ensemble. My teacher was really good in selecting partners for ensemble: students in her ensembles have never had the same temper; they always had different performance styles. I was a too tall for her age teenage-girl, a little bit clumsy and uneasy with guys. Well, at least that’s how I fell about myself. My partner was my best friend, a frail skinny girl with blond eye-lashes and tiny fingers. An image of a girl for me at that time.

I remember my frustration and envy because I always got the second voice on the piano in the kingdom of bass, accompaniment and pedal. I always sounded heavy and dull; I always had to play quieter to let the melody in the first voice reign in the air. At least that’s how I felt about my part. And my delicate friend in the first voice always performed this refined, beautiful melody with the tinkling notes of the upper octaves. Moreover, she always sat closer to the audience and I knew from personal experience that nobody noticed the second voice performer, everyone followed fingers of the first voice performer. I confess, I thought it was unfair that my teacher never gave me the first voice.

I graduated from music school after 9 years of studying with big doubts whether I should leave music or not. My friend dropped off after 3 years.  And it never crossed my mind that my teacher’s strategy of choosing partners and distributing voices in fact was supposed to flatter me. I never realized till now that the second voice in most of the ensembles is the hardest and the most important one. The accompaniment has to be deep and strong, full of feelings and thoughts; it has to be a true soul of the piece. While the first voice is just the front facade of the piece, the brilliant but meaningless decoration of the building, it’s the face, not the soul. Pretty often the first voice score is much easier to perform than the second one.

It wasn’t till couple of days ago that I noticed that if you cut off the first voice part from most of the pieces (even not ensembles) you will still hear the melody, you will still see the core of the piece. The true melody of the music is in the second hand’s score. This discovery made me thinking of the true core in different things, not just music. How often we notice only the bright facade, the “first-hand’s score” of the world around us choosing a good-looking person over the kind one to be friend with, buying a colorful, shallow magazine instead of modest-looking but profound book, watching the vacuous, super-hero movie with special effects instead of thoughtful, but “not-action” one. We are greeting famous sportsmen, musicians, scholars forgetting to notice their coaches, their teachers who are often the base of their success but always live in the shadow.

Everyone can see, everyone can hear, everyone can know. It’s just about making an effort to notice a small, unpretentious room with books behind the luxurious sparkling entrance. 

To wait (inspired by the Russian documentary about life in Siberia “Happy people”)

She gets used to wait. Once he told her this phrase and it stuck in her mind. Every time she feels worn-out and weak she just replays his words again and again in her mind. And it seems give her a strength to move on.

Our nature found a right place for everyone - animals, plants, birds, fish – but a man. We have to find our place and our calling ourselves. Those who found THEIR place on the Earth are happy people. That’s what he said. And it looks like he found it; he found the very spot and the very moment where he was destined to be. Otherwise how would he survive there, all alone with taiga for more than three months in a row?

Tatyana’s husband is not gabby at all – all hunters in taiga are more used to birds whistling and snow crunching than to human speech. But sometimes when he is a little moony or just can’t fall asleep at night after coming home from his hunting sector he talks. A wooden, firmly felled house seems to be too silent for him after last 90 nights in a tiny log cabin in the middle of a wild forest. He shares with her thoughts that passed through his mind during long days and nights with no one for hundreds of kilometers around. There are a lot of deep insights but there is never enough time to finish them. There is always something much more urgent to do – work, everyday survival in the cold, dogs, forest to take care of.

Hunters don’t carry with them all these fetishistic crap like photos, lockets, coins. Space in their luggage is very limited. He just remembers. He remembers the sound of his daughter’s laughing when he carried her on his back around the whole house. He remembers Tatyana’s warm breath on his callous hands when she helped him to unbutton his frosted coat.

Nobody ever asked him why he hunts, why he spends half of the year in taiga using every opportunity to get fish or precious arctic fox. Everyone knows the answer. A hunter has a family to take care of. So it was through hundreds of years.   

To wait isn’t the hardest thing to do. In fact, Tatyana never has time to torment herself over her husband when he is out of village, hunting somewhere in the impenetrable thickets of taiga. There is no energy left for it after the whole day of cooking, cleaning the snow, heating the house, taking care of kids and other millions of things to do in her big household.

However, painful moments are those skimpy conversations through the radio when she barely unscrambles a couple of words (all people in the village use the same radio line to talk to their relatives). He is ok, dogs are fine, and kisses to children. She waits for that call for weeks and it’s usually done in 2-3 minutes. If it works at all because the radio signal in taiga is mutable. And she is waiting again.

The hardest days are last three days before his comeback. Tatyana feels unable to settle down, her house fish pie gets overcooked and kids suddenly become naughty. She never knows when exactly he shows up because it depends on Yenisei River, on amount of snow, on weather, on his snowmobile and tons of other factors. It took her a while to get used to this uncertainty. She still winces every time she hears a drone of the motor from the street. Every minute she is ready to run out of the house to meet him.

But there are moments when she knows that they ARE those happy people he was talking about. When they sit side-by-side with all other villagers in the small, decorated concert room of their local school and look at their children singing and dancing in a circle around a New Year’s tree.  She hears their daughter’s joyous laughter and feels her husband’s protecting arm around her shoulders… It’s worth to wait.