AP
Malian soldiers patrol the streets of Gao, northern Mali, Tuesday Feb. 5, 2013. Troops from France and Chad moved into Kidal in an effort to secure the strategic north Malian city, a French official said Tuesday, as the international force put further pressure on the Islamic extremists to push them out of their last major bastion of control in the north.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Police have rounded up youths they suspect of trying to join Islamist extremists in West Africa
PARIS: France, waging war against Islamist extremists in Mali, is on the hunt for would-be fighters at home, fearful that they will join militants in the conflict in its former African colony or take radical action on French soil.
With Iraq and Afghanistan no
longer magnets for foreign fighters, officials say they worry that some angry youth among the country's large Muslim population are instead looking to test their radicalized faith on the battlefield in Mali or the Syrian civil war.
Police have rounded up youths they suspect of trying to join Islamist extremists in West Africa, arresting four this week, and expelled radical imams and others considered risks to public order. Authorities, who have long viewed France's Muslim community of at least 5 million with a special lens, say they fear they could trigger a spread of radicalization among Muslims in disaffected suburban housing projects where unemployment and resentment against state institutions is rife.
Moderate Muslims express concern that sweeps against suspected Islamist extremists risk stigmatizing all Muslims in France.
In the latest case, authorities detained four people in a Paris suburb who are believed to have links to a Frenchman caught last year in Niger on the border with Mali as radical fighters were expanding their control in the region.
French authorities are trying to determine whether there were links among them, or to a budding network for sending fighters from France to the Sahara, a judicial official said on the condition of anonymity because an anti-terrorist investigation is under way.
