(France 24) After weeks of harrowing accounts of the shootings and the enduring trauma for survivors, the trial of the January 2015 Paris attacks took a step back at the weekend to hear testimony from Farid Benyettou, a self-taught preacher whose quest to dispatch young jihadists to Iraq would come back to haunt France a decade later.
On March 18, 2003, just two days before the US launched its invasion of Iraq, listeners tuning in to French radio RTL would have heard the exalted voice of a young Parisian urging his “mates from the 19th [arrondissement of the French capital]” to join him in Baghdad.
“I’m ready to blow myself up, to lay bombs, and then, boum! boum!” the teenager ranted in a news report from a training camp near the Iraqi capital. “We’re mujahideens, we want death, we want paradise!”
