The new novel Les Événements (The Events), by the French author Jean Rolin, tells the tale of a France that has descended into a chaotic and multifaceted civil war involving jihadist, nationalist and Marxist militias, in various and fluctuating combinations, as well as remnants of the regular army. Among many incredible details described in the book, perhaps the most incredible concerns an Algerian Islamist who is convicted of plotting to carry out a terrorist attack on the Eiffel Tower. Having served his jail term, the convicted terrorist’s expulsion from France is blocked by a European court, and, consequently, he ends up being housed at the public’s expense in a two-star hotel in the scenic Auvergne. There, he lives comfortably on welfare payments, before, one day, he takes the keys to the car of the hotelkeeper’s wife, and drives off to points unknown.
The most incredible thing about Rolin’s story is that it is true. The Algerian Islamist in question is one Saïd Arif, a jihadist veteran who is reputed to have been a lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq. In 2006, Arif and more than two dozen co-defendants were convicted by a Parisian court of having plotted to carry out terrorist attacks on French soil in 2001 and 2002. French investigators found evidence that the conspirators were planning to use chemical weapons in the attacks. According to the deposition of one of the suspects, the Eiffel Tower figured among the list of potential targets. French prosecutors have also linked Arif to the so-called Frankfurt cell, which had been planning to carry out an attack on Strasbourg’s famous Christmas market, before the plot was broken up in late 2000.
In 2007, Arif’s conviction was upheld by an appeals court, and he was sentenced to ten years in prison. In addition, the court prohibited him from remaining on or returning to French territory, a ban that should have gone into effect at the end of his jail term. In December 2011, Arif was released from prison, having served two-thirds of his sentence, including time held in preventive detention prior to his conviction. Pace the ban imposed by the French court, however, he was not deported. This is because the European Court of Human Rights had, in the meanwhile, ruled that Arif could not be returned to his native Algeria, where, in the court’s view, he would risk facing mistreatment.
The French Ministry of the Interior acquiesced. The same Ministry of the Interior that had previously described Arif as “one of the most hardened jihadists that our country has had to confront in recent years,” now became, in effect, his guardian, putting him up, with full room and board, at a string of cheap hotels at remote locations in the French countryside.
English-language news reports have stated that Arif was under house arrest. But this description is misleading. Having served his jail time, Arif was a free man. The conditions under which he lived resembled probation. He was free to come and go as he pleased, though he was required to check in several times per day with the local police or gendarmerie.
Arif’s first stop after his release was Millau in the south of France. Within three weeks, he had already disappeared. He would be found several months later in Sweden, where he had reportedly gone to join his wife and two children.
Brought back to France, by the end of 2012, Arif had been moved to the small town of Brioude in the Auvergne. There, a hotel called La Vieille Auberge was his home. He himself calculated the cost of his upkeep to the French taxpayer at 2600 euros (or nearly $3,000) per month.
Just as recounted in Rolin’s novel, sometime on the evening of May 11, 2013, Arif took the keys to the car of the hotelkeeper’s wife and drove off. According to the hotelkeeper Philippe Nicolas, everything had seemed normal earlier in the evening. “I prepared him his halal dinner, like every night,” Nicolas said.
“He was very classy,” Nicolas added, “Before stealing the vehicle, he took out all of my wife’s personal belongings, including the Chanel sunglasses I had just given her as a present.”
Later that night, a traffic camera snapped a picture of the car speeding on the A1 highway in northern France, apparently en route to Belgium. The picture represents that last verifiable trace of Saïd Arif. According to a local paper, shortly before fleeing, Arif received a payment of some 5,000 euros (or nearly $6,000) from the Brioude unemployment office.
Late last month, several Twitter feeds announced that Säid Arif had been killed in Syria, apparently by a coalition airstrike, though pro-regime media also credited Syrian armed forces with the strike. Per the tweets, Arif had become the “military emir” of Jund al-Aqsa, a jihadist formation allied with Syria’s official al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. In this capacity, Arif is supposed to have been known by the nom de guerre Abu Ibrahim al-Jazairi.
It should be noted that the tweets were generally illustrated with photos of Arif that had previously appeared in the French media and that were taken during his period as a guest of the French government in Millau, Brioude and elsewhere. What appears to be the only allegedly “new” photo of Arif shows nothing more than a charred unrecognizable corpse.
John Rosenthal is the author of The Jihadist Plot: The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion. You can follow his work at www.trans-int.com or on Facebook here.
