On November 5, a car drove along a road on the island of Oléron (Nouvelle-Aquitaine) for 35 minutes, hitting pedestrians in its path. Two people were seriously injured. Many others had to be taken care of. The man shouted “Allahu Akbar!” (God is the greatest) the moment he is stopped. He also attempted to set fire to the car, where he was carrying several butane canisters. His journey lasted just over half an hour, but suddenly the door opened through which the ghosts of terrorism of the last ten years emerged.
Jihadist tension in France has decreased since November 13, 2015, when three nine-man commandos with automatic weapons and explosive belts, in a synchronized action between 9.20pm, said: on Friday and 1.40am on Saturday, they killed 130 people and wounded 350; 90 people lost their lives in the Bataclan concert hall. In various terraces and restaurants in the 10th and 11th arrondissements of Paris, another 39. At the Stade de France, another. The Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group, which still controlled cities such as Raqa, Syria, or Mosul, Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attacks a few hours later. It was a response, they announced, to France’s participation in the international coalition bombing their positions in the two Arab countries.
The questions that arose were endless. One has affected the foundations of the country. Were the assassins children of the Republic? French and third generation Europeans? Since then, two schools have opposed each other, represented by two great scholars of the phenomenon: Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel. The first believes that jihadism does not arise from Islam itself, but from a process of youthful and nihilistic rebellion that uses Islam as a symbolic frame. Young people marginalized or in existential crisis who Islamize their radicalism. The second believes that the phenomenon is the result of an ideological and theological process internal to political Islam. That is, Islamist ideology (Salafi preaching, political-religious discourse) creates a cultural and social climate that ends up producing jihadists.
Roy, author of the book Jihad and death, He believes that this phenomenon, as an ideology, “decomposed with the disappearance of the caliphate.” “The Bataclan has radicalized public opinions. But we are in decline. The jihadist bubble has deflated. I compare it to the seventies, with a great global revolutionary wave that turned towards terrorism and which, little by little, was reduced to individual actions. And the proof is that the public debate today, the controversy, is not jihadism, but the Muslim Brotherhood, which has nothing to do with it. On the contrary, they infiltrate, they work in depth. Before the danger was jihadism, Salafism. And now there is that infiltration,” says Roy.
The threat has been mitigated. But he’s younger. As of 2023, of the 37 people arrested for jihadist terrorism projects, 70% were under the age of 21, according to published data Le Monde this week based on intelligence data. Some were under 15 or 16 years old. The security forces even applied mica (administrative confinement measures in a restricted perimeter or at the family home) to children under 15 years of age. Since the beginning of 2025, six planned attacks have been foiled, with defendants aged between 17 and 22.
Kepel just published Counter-terrorism: hunt for jihadists (Éditions Plon), a profound and comprehensive book, written with the former French anti-terrorism prosecutor, Jean-François Ricardwhich offers a balance sheet of four decades of Islamic terrorism. The political scientist and Arabist underlines that “the threat has changed”. Today something similar to what happened 10 years ago could not be repeated. “Because the Caliphate was destroyed. That’s why there were attacks in France, to put pressure on European states to stop the bombings in Syria and Iraq, which were trying to destroy it”, he indicates on the phone.
The disappearance of ISIS has disarmed jihadism and liquidated its methods of warfare, insists Kepel, who coined the term “atmospheric jihadism”. “Today it is an endogenous terrorism that works on social networks with ever younger people, difficult to detect even though the States have more powerful machines than the idiots who decide to radicalize themselves. This does not prevent isolated attacks with knives from occurring, because in those young people there is a total disinhibition. Destroying an avatar on the Internet or killing someone in real life is almost the same thing. And this is linked to a very strong crisis in society. Everything happens on the Internet, and there you learn how to build a bomb or kill an infidel, they are there are few conversations that can address it,” he underlines.
The report published by Le Monde highlights that, after a steady decrease in terrorist attacks and projects between 2017 and 2023, a recovery has been observed since the end of last year. The Minister of the Interior, Laurent Nuñez, also warned about this this week. This development coincides with the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 and the war of annihilation waged by the Israeli army in Gaza in retaliation. This context has been widely echoed in the propaganda of large terrorist groups. In June 2025, the emir of the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda launched a call for attacks in the West to avenge the Palestinian people, victims of Israel and its allies.
Attacks, however, today take place by isolated individuals and with rudimentary means: three-quarters of those committed since 2020 in France were carried out with edged weapons. According to the secret services, as of 2020 two thirds of the perpetrators of attacks were unknown to specialized databases, that is, they were not registered in any register. They act autonomously, choosing their victims without waiting for orders.
The threat is less than that posed by commandos hardened by armed jihadism, trained in Syria and who carried out attacks with weapons of war, as in 2015. However, there have been very serious cases that have traumatized the country, such as the deaths of Samuel Paty (2020) and Dominique Bernard (2023), both teachers murdered in front of their schools by radicalized young people.
Today terrorists come from other regions, as Roy recalls. “Samuel Paty’s killer was Chechen.” The Afghan community, which has grown significantly since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban (August 2021), is also under close surveillance.
Born in the 1980s, as a reaction to the Russian presence in Afghanistan, global jihadism is both a defensive project and an ideological program, that of a return to the origins of Islam. But in recent times it has maintained a direct link to other conflicts outside the borders of where the attacks occurred.
Since the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, more than half of the attacks or foiled attacks are linked, directly or indirectly, to the situation in Gaza (by type of target or claim). In 2015 and 2016, ISIS, under the influence of Rachid Kassim, recommended avoiding Jewish targets, so that their “signature” would not be confused with anti-Semitism.
One of the biggest wounds of the 2015 attacks was the polarization they created, Kepel believes. Especially because among the attackers there were young French men of Muslim origin. “Among them there were people vying for social ascendancy. Today the far left, since Jean-Luc Mélenchon (leader of France Insoumise) participated in the demonstration against Islamophobia in 2019, has formed an alliance with the Islamists to try to recover votes from voters from the Muslim world. And it has been a great success: they have many deputies. But the result translates into a terrible polarization where Jordan Bardella (president of the far-right group National) has 35% support in the polls,” he concludes.
