‘Most lone wolves are high on motivation but low on skills. Mohammad Merah was high on both’

In the aftermath of the French killing spree by Mohammad Merah, Dani Garavelli reports on the lone ‘self-starters’ who are now the most dangerous and unpredictable of terrorists

Skidding around a car park in a BMW, a trail of dust blowing up in his wake, Mohammad Merah looks like the kind of low-level hoodlum you might find in any rundown banlieue in France. With hindsight, perhaps, there is something manic about the way he grins at the camera; his aggression as he makes the gun gestures is barely controlled. But his attitude is more a wannabe gangsta than fundamentalist Islamist intent on jihad.

Yet, by the time he jumped from the window of his Toulouse apartment, firing his Colt 45 in all directions on Friday, the 23-year-old had taken seven lives – three paratroopers, a Rabbi and three Jewish children – in a series of shootings intended as revenge for the war in Afghanistan and the plight of Palestinians.

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Merah – described by some as an affable neighbour, by others as a waster – had used unprecedented violence in pursuit of his cause. So all-consuming was his hatred of Jews, he held eight-year-old Myriam Monsonego by the hair so he could shoot her at point-blank range. So extreme were his views on Islam, he saw north African soldiers serving in the French army as traitors.

As the elite RAID team moved in, the street where Merah had been holed up for 32 hours was transformed into a war zone, juddering under the force of the crossfire, before a marksman’s bullet put an end to the nightmare which had terrorised Toulouse, reshaped the political landscape in the run-up to the French presidential election, and left the country asking itself questions about its attitudes towards race and the efficiency of its intelligence service.

But the repercussions of Merah’s act go beyond national borders. Radicalised and heavily armed, but operating without external direction, he belonged to what the counter-terrorism experts regard as the most dangerous and unpredictable category of terrorists – the “self-starter.”

“Following ongoing efforts by authorities to track networks and operational links between individuals and groups, the capacity of big terrorist organisations to carry out mass-casualty attacks has decreased,” says Benoit Gomis, a researcher at Chatham House. “The main threat now comes increasingly from independent individuals who are often detached from wider society and who primarily intend to carry out low-tech attack on soft targets.”

Such self-starters are not necessarily “lone wolves” in the style of Norwegian Anders Breivik, who, though well-versed in far-right rhetoric had no terrorist links. They may – like Merah – have been trained at Jihadi camps on the Afghan/Pakistan border, and be loosely affiliated with extremists mosques or groups. But they will not be part of an organised cells – or plot their attacks with co-conspirators – making it difficult for the counter-terrorism agencies to predict when or where they might strike. The UK has already been targeted by several such individuals. In 2009, Muslim convert Andrew Ibrahim, the son of an NHS consultant in Bristol, was jailed for planning a suicide bomb attack, while the following year Roshonara Choudhry, who radicalised herself over the internet in her bedroom, attempted to murder Labour MP Stephen Timms at his constituency surgery in east London.

With the Olympics only a few months away, and dozens of potentially violent Islamic extremists still thought to be living in the UK, British counter-intelligence experts will be keen to learn how Merah planned and executed his crimes – and what could have been done to stop him.

Merah’s journey from truculent child to Jihadi martyr began in Les Izards, a troubled housing estate with a large North African population. Long-regarded as a delinquent, his descent into petty crime began when his parents split up. Within the space of a few years he had garnered 15 convictions for offences from theft to armed robbery. No-one, however, suspected the joker, who loved football, scooters and nightclubbing, and had twice tried, and failed, to join the French army, was the type of man to kill for a religious cause.

It was during two short stints in jail – where those who have been to al-Qaeda training camps often take on the status of heroes – that Merah first became radicalised. Unbeknownst to friends, he was also loosely involved with the Salafist Muslim fundamentalist groups of which his 29-year-old brother Abdelkader was a member. Abdelkader, now under arrest, is yesterday reported as saying: “I am very proud of my brother. I regret nothing for him and approve of what he did.”

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But there is no evidence to suggest those fundamentalist groups either inspired or encouraged Merah’s terrorist tendencies. Instead, it seems more likely he dreamed up his deadly attacks while training in Jihadi camps on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

Although details are sketchy (some say he was stopped at a roadblock and flown back to France), it seems clear Merah attracted the attention of the intelligence services when he travelled to the area in 2010 and 2011.

By the time he was ready to carry out his killing sprees, he was on both the US no-fly list and the watchlist of the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence, which had been in contact with him as recently as November. Merah became the first homegrown Islamic terrorist to commit acts of violence on French soil when he shot dead a paratrooper and stole his scooter on 11 March. Four days later he killed two more paratroopers and injured a third in Montauban. Four days after that, he gunned down the Rabbi and three children in France’s first ever school massacre.

Because two of the paratroopers were of north African origin, speculation was at first rife that the killings were the work of a far-right extremist. But, after the shooting at the Jewish school, a trail of clues pointed straight to Merah.

It didn’t take long for the police to track him down and, though he held out against them, RAID officers brought the siege to a bloody conclusion, one that would deny the public a chance to see justice done and to gain potentially useful intelligence.

Far from bringing closure, Merah’s death has sparked a period of national soul-searching. Coming during a presidential election campaign, which has been characterised by the racially inflammatory language of some of the frontrunners, the tragedy is also being exploited for political gain.

Within hours of the siege ending, Front National leader Marine Le Pen was engaging in a bout of I-told-you-so-ing, insisting the dangers of radicalisation had been “greatly underestimated”. But the main beneficiary, politically speaking, is likely to be President Nicolas Sarkozy. If the killer had turned out to be a white supremacist, the president would doubtless have found himself under fire for stoking racial tension, with controversial comments about Halal meat in schools. As it is, the tragedy has afforded him plenty of opportunities to look statesmanlike, announce plans to crack down on those who look at extremist websites and fight off competition from socialist François Hollande, who, before last week’s tragedy, looked set to win.

While Sarkozy is shoring up support, French intelligence services are under fire for allowing Merah to amass a cache of weapons, including an Uzi sub-machine gun, a Sten gun and a pump action shotgun, while supposedly under surveillance.

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The problem for counter-intelligence agencies, however, is that the behaviour of independent operators is notoriously difficult to predict; and Merah was atypical even of independent operators.

“Most lone wolves are high on motivation but low on skills. This guy was high on motivation and high on skills. He has clearly received training with weapons and his familiarity with using them is advanced,” Professor Michael Clarke, director of the think-tank the Royal United Services Institute, said last week.

“Many lone wolves have been people who want to blow themselves up in an act of self expression. Instead, Merah is someone who methodically thought through how he would campaign against a range of targets and establish his own getaway each time. In many ways he is more reminiscent of a sinister Carlos the Jackal figure than the crude self-starters we usually see.”

Impossible to pigeon-hole, self-starters have no established modus operadi (Merah’s drive-by shootings, after all, had more in common with the Baader-Meinhof attacks than with al-Qaeda’s suicide bombings).

A further problem is understanding what makes these individuals tick. Are they truly Islamist terrorists or merely disturbed individuals who have hung their disaffection on the nearest available ideological coat-peg? Merah, for example, may have espoused Islamic extremism, but he had no desire to die a religious martyr, choosing the marksman’s bullets only as alternative to humiliating surrender.

“Their motivations are very often personal and local, hidden underneath vaguely defined and grander aspirations or justifications for their violent acts,” Gomis says.

According to the French intelligence services, Merah is one of 150 Islamists who have left Western Europe to fight in Afghanistan in the past five years. British sources believe 40 to 50 Britons have fought with the al-Shabaab Mujahideen in Somalia. But even if everyone who had ever taken part in a jihadi camp was identified, it would be difficult to ascertain which, if any, posed a threat to national security.

“Of course it’s likely there are potential terrorists living in the UK,” says Dr Jeffrey Stevenson Murer, a lecturer in collective violence at St Andrews University’s school of international relations. “What’s difficult for the security services in a democracy is deciding when to act. If someone living in Bradford goes to Pakistan, is that something to be suspicious of? And even if you go to a training camp? It’s easy to say after the fact that the French intelligence services should have intervened, but it’s not at all clear these attacks were the inevitable outcome. And then you risk setting out on the dangerous path on which democracies should fear to tread, that in the name of prevention, travel somehow becomes the basis of suspicion – that leads to elimination of civil liberties.”

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Where, as in the case of Nicky Reilly, a Muslim convert jailed for trying to blow up an Exeter cafe, terrorism is linked to wider social, behavioural or mental health problems, predicting the outcome can be even more difficult. “Many people show complex behavioural and psychiatric problems, but we tend not to do anything until they present either as a debilitating problem for the person, or in some way result in violence of damage to society in general,” says Professor Max Taylor, the director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University.

“In the absence of explicit damage, there is really little a society that doesn’t arbitrarily imprison people can do, the simple reason being that our risk assessment judgments are invariably post hoc, and we do not have good proactive tools for judging risk.”

So what can the UK learn from what happened in France? Certainly, it might be worth noting that one of the reasons the French intelligence services did not focus more closely on Merah is that he had never contacted a violent Islamic group, and had travelled to Afghanistan under his own steam, not as part of an Islamic network.

But long-term, the experts claim, the best way to stop homegrown terrorism is to prevent racial resentments from festering. “Technically, no government in the world can prevent every single small attack attempted by one single individual,” concedes Gomis. “What they can and should do though, is make sure their crisis management operations are quick, effective and measured, as was the response of French RAID, and that their political statements and reactions to attacks appease fear rather than encourage it.

“For long-term benefits, governments should ensure their security policies are non-discriminatory, based on fairness, tolerance and the rule-of-law and avoid inflammatory language and policies.” «

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