Why is France the target of so many terrorist atrocities?
Last night's Bastille Day truck attack was the third major terror outrage since January 2015
THE horrific Bastille Day truck attack in Nice is the third major terror atrocity in France inside two years - and comes after ISIS vowed to put the country top of its hit list.
More than 1,000 homegrown jihadis have fled France to fight in Iraq and Syria - and many have been able to slip back in to plot carnage in the West.
The Paris attacks that left 130 dead in November and the Charlie Hebdo shootings in the capital last January left many Frenchmen asking why their country has become a hotbed for jihadi terrorism.
Experts say young Muslims are being radicalised because of simmering racial tensions in ostracised communities where youth unemployment is high.
A perceived state war against organised religion and France's air strikes against ISIS and continued military intervention in Mali and other former North African colonies are also said to have stoked resentment and provided a twisted justification for bloodshed at home.
Analysts say France's colonial history is of key importance in understanding 21st century terrorism.
Since 1830, when it conquered Algeria, France has seen much of Muslim Africa as its own backyard, according to John R. Bowen, Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St Louis, US.
After World War I, France took control of Syria and Lebanon and after World War II, many North Africans came to France to work in new factories, most settling in poor areas in Paris, Lyon, and the industrialised north.
France left Algeria only at the end of a long and bloody war, from 1954 to 1962, and many Algerians who fought on both sides of the war settled in Provence and kept the conflict alive.
After factories were shut down, the settlers remained but felt marginalised by French society - leading to rage among the settlers' children and grandchildren that exploded in nationwide riots in 2005.
The anger felt by Muslim communities provided fertile ground for extremist recruiters - who then played on other events to stoke violence.
Under President Francois Hollande, France launched its first air strikes against ISIS targets in Syria last September.
Prof Bowen said: "Unlike other European colonial powers, the French never really left their former colonies, continuing to intervene economically and militarily to defend France’s national interests in Africa and the Near East.
"Now this means battling al Qaeda and ISIS in Mali, Iraq and Syria. So when disaffected young men and women tune in to jihadi websites, they find French-speaking Muslims telling them of the sins their government is committing against their 'brothers and sisters' in Iraq and Syria.
"Resentment at French racism, at the series of largely symbolic measures taken against Muslims, such as the 2010 ban on wearing face-veils in public, add to this anger, and lead some towards fighting."
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ISIS called Paris "the capital of prostitution and vice" in a statement claiming responsibility for the Paris attacks in November. The terror group also stated that France and "all nations following in its path" are "at the top of the target list for the Islamic State."
Witnesses at the Bataclan theatre massacre said that the gunmen shouted in French: "This is because of all the harm done by Hollande to Muslims all over the world."
Will McCants, an expert on extremism and author of the recent book The ISIS Apocalypse said last November's attack could have been a warning to France to cease strikes in Syria.
But he said it was also a question of launching attacks "where they had the greatest opportunity."
He said: "The nation that is ISIS' greatest enemy is the United States and you would have to expect that would be at the very top of their list of targets. But it's also very difficult to get operatives into this country."
Neil Fergus, an Australian-based expert on international terrorism who works with French authorities, said France had come under attack from homegrown French terrorists and others who travelled from outside the country to inflict maximum devastation on the nation.
He said: “The history of jihadi attacks in France goes back to the mid-90s when the (Algerian terror group) GIA launched attacks on the metro rail system.”
French authorities were currently investigating more than 150 cases in the greater Paris region as part of their ongoing counter-terrorism efforts, he said.
He added: “Paris and France are at the heart of western philosophy. It is abhorrent to these people. Europe is abhorrent to these people. France is seen as the epicentre.”
George Packer, a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker who covered the Iraq war, suggested in an article called "The Other France" that the Paris suburbs are an "incubator for terrorism."
He said: "France has all kinds of suburbs, but the word for them, banlieues, has become pejorative, meaning slums dominated by immigrants.
"Inside the banlieues are the cités: colossal concrete housing projects built during the postwar decades in the Brutalist style of Le Corbusier. Conceived as utopias for workers, they have become concentrations of poverty and social isolation.
"The cités and their occupants are the subject of anxious and angry discussion in France."
Andrew Hussey, a British scholar at the University of London School of Advanced Study in Paris, told Packer: “The kids in the banlieues live in this perpetual present of weed, girls, gangsters, Islam.
"They have no sense of history, no sense of where they come from in North Africa, other than localised bits of Arabic that they don’t understand, bits of Islam that don’t really make sense.”
France's political and judicial institutions are also seen as hostile to organised religion - such as the controversy over the ban on women wearing hijabs in public.
Another factor is thought to be the wide availability of powerful firearms left over from conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s.
John Schindler, the national security columnist for The New York Observer, tweeted after November attacks: “Jihadists with Balkan small arms were shooting up France in 1995 … got no idea why anybody is surprised.”
France has now been under a state of emergency — which gives security and legal forces more power to conduct investigations and arrest suspects — for 19 months.
Police and intelligence agencies were braced for attacks during the Euro 2016 football tournament, which thankfully passed without incident - although a police chief and his wife were beheaded at their home in Manganville near Paris.
The state of emergency was due to be lifted on July 26 after the Tour de France cycling race but has instead been extended another three months following last night's Bastille Day attack in Nice.
It was not the first time a vehicle has been used as a weapon by jihadis in France.
In December 2014 A man yelling "Allahu Akbar" ran over 11 pedestrians in Dijon, and the next day there was an identical attack in Nantes, killing one and injuring ten.
And in January this year a Frenchman of Tunisian heritage tried to run down troops guarding a mosque in Valence.
France's bloody history of terrorism
July 14, 2016: A driver ploughed a truck into a mass of Bastille Day spectators and fired rounds at them along the famed Promenade des Anglais seafront in Nice. At least 84 people were killed and many more wounded.
June 13, 2016: Convicted terrorist Larossi Abballa stabs two married police officers in their home in Magnanville in an attack claimed by ISIS. Abballa holds the couple’s three-year-old son hostage and live streams the murder of his parents to Facebook before police storm the home and rescue the child.
November 13, 2015: ISIS terrorists simultaneously attack public sites in Paris, killing 130 and wounding more than 350 in the worst attack on France’s soil since World War II. ISIS claims responsibility, calling the attacks the “first of the storm.”
August 21, 2015: Ayoub El Kahzani boards a Thalys train from Amsterdam to France armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, pistol, ammunition, and a box cutter. Two US servicemen and two Europeans observed the suspect preparing to attack and intervened, preventing the
suspect from inflicting what French President Francois Hollande said could have been “a true carnage.” El Kahzani was kept on an international watch list and had reportedly travelled to Syria in 2014.
April 19, 2015: Algerian extremist Sid Ahmed Glam attempts to gun down a church in the suburbs of Paris.
June 26, 2015: Yassine Salhi, drives into an American-owned gas factory in southeastern France.
He throws gas canisters in the yard outside, and decapitates a man (Salhi’s boss), covering the victim’s head in the Muslim declaration of faith, “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.” A flag emblazoned with Islamist inscriptions is found at the site of the attack.
January 7, 2015 — January 9, 2015: Brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi launch a deadly assault on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 in the name of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The Charlie Hebdo attack is the deadliest on French soil in more than 50 years. In the days following the attack, gunman Amedy Coulibaly goes on a shooting rampage, killing a policewoman before taking and killing hostages at a kosher supermarket in the name of IS.
May 24, 2014: French-born jihadist Mehdi Nemmouche kills four at a Jewish Museum in Brussels.
May 25, 2013: Muslim convert and Islamist Alexandre Dhaussy stabs a French soldier in a suburb of Paris.
March 2012: Gunman Mohammed Merah goes on shooting spree in Toulouse, killing seven including three children at a Jewish school.
November 2, 2011: Charlie Hebdo offices are firebombed.
2009 — 2011: Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) kidnaps a number of French citizens.
Sources: Christian Science Monitor, National, Al Arabiya, France24
October 2002: A bomb explodes next to a French tanker in Yemen, killing one crew member.
May 2002: A bomb explodes in Karachi, killing 11 French navy experts.
December 3, 1996: A bomb explodes at Port Royal station in Paris, killing two and wounding seven.
October 1995: On October 6, a bomb explodes at a metro station in Paris, injuring 12.
On October 17, a bomb explodes in a train in Paris, injuring 29.
September 1995: On September 3, a bomb explodes in an open-air market in Paris, injuring four.
On September 4, police find an unexploded bomb in a public toilet in Charles Vallin square in Paris. On September 7, a car bomb explodes near a Jewish school in Lyons, wounding 14.
August 1995: On August 17, GIA bombs Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, wounding 17.
On August 26, police find an unexploded bomb on a railway track near Lyons.
July 1995: On July 11, The GIA assassinates Muslim cleric Abdelbaki Sahraoui at a mosque in northern Paris.
On July 25, a bomb claimed by the GIA explodes at the Saint-Michel metro station in Paris, killing eight and injuring around 150.
December 24, 1994: The GIA hijacks Air France Flight 8969 and kills three hostages before France’s GIGN storm the aircraft in Marseilles, freeing the remaining passengers.
1983: Hezbollah bombs French Marine Barracks in Beirut, killing 58 French service members.
August 1982: Gunmen open fire and throw grenades at a restaurant in the Jewish quarter of Paris, killing six and wounding 22.
June 18, 1961: The OAS bombs a train, killing 28.