Mourad Benchellali understands perfectly why thousands of young Europeans, male and female, have joined the jihad in Syria.
Mourad was 18 when his brother Menad persuaded him to travel to Afghanistan on another man's passport in June 2001. He ended up in al-Qaeda's al-Farouq training camp, in the Afghan city of Kandahar, was captured by the US army in the autumn of 2001 and spent the next two and a half years as "package 161" at Guantánamo Bay. When the Americans shipped him back to France, Benchellali was sent straight to a French prison. He recounted his experience in his book, Voyage Vers l'Enfer, or Journey to Hell.
Now 33 and a tiling instructor, Benchellali spends most of his spare time trying to dissuade wannabe jihadis from repeating his mistakes. He has been much in demand since last January’s jihadist attacks in Paris.
Like swathes of Syria and Iraq today, Afghanistan under the Taliban had pretensions to being an “Islamic state”, Benchellali reminds those who will listen. “People went there because they thought it was the place where they could live their religion.”
The son of Algerian immigrants, Benchellali grew up in the infamous Minguettes housing complex in Vénissieux, outside Lyons. “I was just a kid, hungry for adventure,” he says. “My big brother had been to Afghanistan. He said it would be good for my faith. I wasn’t that religious then, but I went along with it.”
Benchellali wanted to escape from Les Minguettes, but he ended up back where he started. His family have paid a heavy price for their espousal of political Islam. Menad Benchellali served seven years of a 10-year sentence for participating in the “Chechen network” that plotted against Russian targets in France. His father, Chellali, and mother, Hafsa, also served time in prison and were deported to Algeria for having helped Menad.
By the time Mourad Benchellali got back from Guantánamo his fiancee had found someone else. He nonetheless married, fathered a son and divorced. Now he lobbies French officials in the hope that his mother, who has heart disease, will be allowed to return to France.
Some of the youths who leave for Syria “want to show they’re brave”, Benchellali says. “Some hate France. Some think it’s a religious duty, that they’ll go to hell if they don’t join the jihad. Others just want their buddies to see them on Facebook, holding a Kalashnikov.
“There’s that rush of power when you hold a loaded Kalashnikov. I know what it feels like. You feel no one can hurt you – not even from a few metres away . . .
"When you watch the video of the Kouachis walking down the street," he says, referring to the brothers who massacred 12 people at Charlie Hebdo magazine last January, "shouting, 'We've avenged the Prophet,' and shooting in the air, you see that sense of being all powerful. They felt like warriors, like X-Men. It's the absolute fantasy. They think, We're traumatising a whole city, a whole country; we didn't exist as youths from the slums, and now we're making the world tremble."
Benchellali’s record as a former Guantánamo Bay prisoner gives him a certain street cred with Muslim youths. But he is annoyed by French reports that he has “declared war on jihad”.
“I’m not against anyone or anything,” Benchellali says. “I just tell young people, ‘It’s wrong to take up weapons. It’s wrong to kill . . . This is what happened to me. This is what I learned. This is why it’s not a good idea.’ I don’t preach. I’m not a cop. After all, if a guy wants to get himself killed, why would I stop him? It’s his right, but I believe he should know what he’s getting into.”
Would-be jihadis harbour a lot of illusions about what they will find when they reach the “Islamic State”, Benchellali says. “They think they will be able to wander around, come and go at will. But someone takes control of them the moment they arrive, takes them to a training camp. I tell them I wasn’t free.
“They believe in clean war. I explain to them that clean war doesn’t exist. I too had good intentions, but I ended up with a gun in my hands.
Benchellali also tells French youths of his experience of the Taliban. When the 9/11 atrocities happened Benchellali made it as far as the Afghan city of Jalalabad. Under US bombardment, with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance closing in, Benchellali’s Afghan mentors – the same men who wanted him to stage a bombing in France – decamped with suitcases of money. “I think Islamic State are hypocrites, and they’ll do the same thing the moment they encounter serious military opposition,” he says.
Benchellali’s message does not please Islamic State followers. “I get death threats from the guys in the housing projects.”
Benchellali never liked Charlie Hebdo magazine. But, he says, he was "shocked and saddened like everyone else" when the Said and Cherif Kouachi massacred its staff.
“At the same time I was afraid, because I knew that we as Muslims, and I in particular as a former Guantánamo prisoner, would be indirect victims . . . The majority of French people see Muslims as potential terrorists, or at the very least they think we sympathise with terrorism, that we agree with it.”
Benchellali sees Guantánamo as a training ground for US interrogators and for jihadist leaders. In every Islamic State execution video, he notes, the victims wear orange jumpsuits, a clear reference to Guantánamo. “But not a single European politician has said, ‘We have to close Guantánamo, because it’s used for propaganda by the terrorists.’ ”
More than 100 of Guantánamo’s original 780 prisoners remain incarcerated. Many of those who are freed become jihadist leaders, Benchellali says.
One day in August 2001 the inhabitants of al-Farouq grew agitated. A convoy of pick-up trucks arrived, carrying a very tall man in white robes. Benchellali swears he’d never heard of Osama bin Laden. Fellow trainees translated his sermon, about the need for suicide attacks on the US, the worst enemy of Islam.
“The men in Camp Farouq were just mujahideen – they didn’t have a name,” Benchellali says. “The first question I was asked at Guantanamo was, ‘Why are you with al-Qaeda?’ I said, ‘Who is al-Qaeda?’ and they said, ‘You’re al-Qaeda. The house where we found you is al-Qaeda. The training camp were you were is al-Qaeda. They guys you met are al-Qaeda.’ ”
