When the “ Lone Wolf ” Hid the Herd : Deconstructing a Security Myth
when in reality he is the product of ideology that has spread since the 2000s within his family ( his brother Abdelkader was later sentenced to thirty years in prison in 2019 for complicity ), his friends , and his neighborhood . Mr . Merah frequented Artigat in 2006 where he met the Clain brothers . He married there under the aegis of Olivier Corel before separating from his girlfriend . He became a model for some Islamic fundamentalists , such as Djibril , who became interested in his career and this religious movement while he was a high school student and left to join ISIS at the age of nineteen . He explains : “ Merah is more than a martyr . He has opened a new era ” and , following the consultation of Islamic fundamentalist forums , Djibril finds a justification for the assassinations of Mr . Merah : the Jewish religion and the military function of the victims are symbolically more important than their identity as children or their belonging to the Muslim religion . Others find in Merah ’ s action a justification for making jihad on French territory and not in the land of Islam .
The acts of Mr . Merah considered as “ isolated acts with no future ” are in reality the opposite . Never has the quotation from Roman de Renart written in the twelfth century been so well applied to the DCRI ’ s watchmen : “ Bad guard allows the wolf to feed .” Bernard Squarcini , the director of the DCRI , compared Mr . Merah in November 2016 to “ one of the confetti that wander around .” In reality , the lone wolf hides the herd , as the naive and dreamy Sansa Stark says in her own way in season 7 of Games of Thrones , broadcast in 2017 , “ The lone wolf dies ... but the pack survives .” The so-called isolated act announces , five years later , the massive involvement of thousands of French people in the jihad in Syria or on the national territory .
Five months after Mr . Merah ’ s attacks , the first jihadist volunteers leaving to fight in Syria in July 2012 are “ ideologically hardened ” and know perfectly well , according to the testimony of one of their number , “ what they were going to do !” After the split in Syria in 2013 between Al-Nosra ( Al-Qaeda ), composed of Syrians , and the Islamic State , composed of a majority of foreigners , the French jihadists were charged with convincing their family , friends , and acquaintances to come to the Caliphate by means of social networks and discussion forums ; this is how Fabien Clain and his entire family left to settle there . The newcomers are now young women , young people between eighteen and twenty-five years old , converts ( 20 percent ) with less religious training than the first arrivals , seduced by videos , and making the decision to leave on a whim . They are fighting to establish the laws of Allah in a politico-religious state , the Caliphate , which is a far cry , according to Hugo Micheron , from the nihilist vision defended by Olivier Roy , where jihadists only seek death .
In 2014 , having arrived in the caliphate of Syria and Iraq , the foreigner is taken care of ; he is destined to be either a fighter or to drive a vehicle and die as a kamikaze ( istichhadi ). The latter is a kind of human bomb in charge of taking a
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