Life
He arrived with his family and followers of traditional Tidjian Islam, at the age of 7 at the Cité de l'Ariane in Nice. In the 1990s, he spent several stints in prison for a bank statement incident, then for his involvement in several robberies, including that of two jewellery shops in Monaco in 2002 and 2003. He is said to have been radicalised in prison and started working for recruitment and conversion to jihadist Islam in his neighbourhood and via propaganda videos made and circulated on YouTube. In 2011, he was already trying to travel to Afghanistan and Yemen with about ten acolytes, but was arrested at the Nice train station on the day of their departure. [4] [5]
Recruitments
Around 2012, he worked at the halal sandwich shop called "La Nusra". Diaby is considered by French anti-terrorist services to be a major recruiter of French jihadists for Syria and a close friend of Forsane Alizza, an Islamist group dissolved in 2012 by the government. "Intelligent, eloquent and manipulative", he became known as a preacher and recruiter, even though he benefited from a regime of semi-freedom and spent his nights in the Nice prison. He began directing the series of videos 19 HH, which are very popular on YouTube and social networks, with the help of Lyonnais Mourad Farès. At the end of 2012, his remarks turned to Syria. [8]
In 2014, the most viewed video produced by Omsen, Destination la Terre Sainte, exceeded 100,000 views. Carefully staged, alternating Arabic and Hollywood music, his videos mix preaching, diverted cinematographic images, often from works of a religious nature, conspiracy theories or messianic works to serve a conspiracy, anti-Semitic, millenarian, sectarian and violent discourse. In the April 2013 video serving as a preamble, 19HH claims to be salafist and takfirist. [9] These films are entitled: "The History of Humanity" — over four hours — "The Truth About Islam" or "The Truth About the Death of Bin Laden." They are held responsible for the first major wave of departures of young French people at a time before the sophisticated audiovisual propaganda of the Islamic State. [10]
He went to Syria in 2013 to lead a group made up mainly of young people from Nice affiliated with the al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. His group numbered up to 150 fighters, including his brother Moussa. From the end of 2013, his group suffered from tensions when it rejected the Islamic State in order to remain loyal to the jihadist group al-Nusra Front out of reverence for al-Qaeda. He went to Senegal to look for members of his family but he confronted his former friend Mourad Farès on his return. [5]
Involvement in conflicts
In May 2015, he participated with his group in the battle of Jisr al-Shoghour1. He was declared dead in August 2015 near the Syrian city of Idlib, [3] [13] but he reappeared in the summer of 2016 in a France 2 report broadcast in Complémentaire d'enquête2. His group then numbered only about forty people, the youngest of whom were Nice residents and Uyghur jihadists from the PIT. Diaby was criticized for staying away from the combat zones. Maintaining that he owed allegiance only to Al-Qaeda and not to the Al-Nusra Front, he was in conflict with his spokesman Abu Firas al-Souri, who was killed in 2016. [14]
Although they distance themselves from ISIS on the ground ("they have a different understanding of Sharia law than ours (...). When you come to a country that is not your own, you don't have the right to immediately impose laws that the people can't understand (...). First of all, we educate the population, we make them understand and love religion. Sharia law is not about cutting off hands, it is not about stoning adulterous women or men"), he does not condemn the attacks of 13 November 2015 and advises to vote for Marine Le Pen in the 2017 presidential election because she promised to stop French military strikes, even if the latter was then referring to Mali and not Syria.
In the summer of 2018, Omar Omsen had disputes with other jihadists in the Idlib region. According to Romain Caillet: "Omar Omsen is accused of having monopolized the homes of his former cronies, but also, and above all, accusations of heterodoxy on the issue of the "jinns", supernatural creatures whose existence is attested in the scriptural texts of the Muslim tradition. In addition, Omar Omsen is also accused of having proclaimed himself an "Islamic judge", without having the skills to do so". In August, Omar Omsen was arrested by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and placed in pre-trial detention in Harim, for having falsely claimed in a statement that he had received the support of a local Islamic court, after a complaint filed against him by French jihadists. However, it is released after a few days. [15] [16] [17] He was arrested again by the same group in August 2020, then released in early 2022. [18]
According to researcher Dareen Khalifa, Omar Omsen was released on "the condition that he does not join any other armed group in Idlib, no longer recruit French fighters, no longer incite against France and no longer speak to the media". The HTS group, considered terrorist by the United States, is seeking to expel certain foreign jihadists in order to become a "respectable" interlocutor in the resolution of the Syrian crisis. [19]
Al-Nusra Front, also known as Front for the Conquest of the Levant, was a Salafi-jihadist organization that fought against Syrian government forces in the Syrian Civil War. Its aim was to overthrow president Bashar al-Assad and establish an Islamic state ruled by Sharia law in Syria.
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