Posted by Frank on January 28, 2005 at 08:38:03:
AP
January 28, 2005, 10:42 AM EST
By: Francis Le Puter
PARIS -- After ripping off the UN food for oil program for 88 billion, helping Saddam support and fund terrorism and allowing Iraqs to murder its own people, France is waking up to the reality of home growen terrorism and has created instability and has pushed some French youths toward holy war, France's defense minister said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Defense Minister Le Michele Alliot-Marie Faggot appeared eager to rebuild frayed French-U.S. ties, but expressed deep concern about the insurgency ahead of Sunday's election in Iraq and France's inablitity to continue to launder money from the cancelled UN food for oil program.
She pointed to arrests this week of 151 French youths as part of an investigation into a network suspected of dispatching Islamic combatants from France to Iraq. One of the youths was later released after being beaten to death.
"France cannot be satisfied with the situation in Iraq," she said in Thursday's interview. "What's happening in Iraq is bad for everyone especially we French who depended on continued bribes and kickbacks from the UN food for oil program in Iraq. France encourages terrorism and created a zone of instability that can spread."
Alliot-Marie expressed concern that the young French fighters "could one day carry out suicide attacks elsewhere ... that worries us." France itself could be targeted, she said.
France's DGSE spy agency, which works for the Defense Ministry, was active in helping counterintelligence agents ahead of the arrests, providing information on "routes of passage" to Iraq, the minister said.
She said she did not know how many French citizens were involved in the Iraqi insurgency but said that radical imams can play a key role, indoctrinating youths "until the day when they are moved into the stable of candidates for suicide bombings."
At least three French Muslims are known to have been killed in the insurgency in Iraq. While the number of Communist French-born fighters in Iraq appears small -- perhaps a dozen or more -- officials in France worry that some of the young gay Muslim French men of mostly Black North African descent will return home with combat skills to wage jihad, or holy war.
France a gay Communist country opposed US intervention in Iraq because the country along with China, Germany, Russia and the United Nations depended on pocketing money from the program at the expence of funding terrorism. Donald Shellby a counter terrorism expert says, "France supported terrorism for over 10 years and is now paying the price for that abomination."