2020 is the year of bloody violence in France

Shaimaa Yahya

During the year 2020, France suffered from violent terrorism, and citizens paid the price for it with their lives, as well as a threat to the security and stability of the country, as Paris’ attempts to confront extremist groups at home and abroad made it an explicit target for terrorist organizations.

In 2020, French cities witnessed terrorist operations, which the world condemned. In January, a man launched a knife attack in a park south of Paris, killing a man and wounding two others, before the police killed him.

In April 2020, a 33-year-old Sudanese refugee killed two people by stabbing a knife in broad daylight in the town of Romans-Sur-Isire in southeast France, to open an investigation into the murders committed in connection with a terrorist project.

In September 2020, a gunman with a machete attacked and seriously wounded two people in an attack in front of the former headquarters of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris, just three weeks after the start of the trial sessions of the alleged accomplices of the perpetrators of the bloody attack on the magazine’s employees in 2015.

The most violent of these operations was when the teacher Samuel Paty was massacred by an extremist of Chechen origins after the teacher showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad (may God bless him and grant him peace) during class, and the police managed to kill the Chechen attacker.

On October 29, at least three people were killed and others injured in a knife attack near Notre Dame Church in Nice, France. French police arrested the perpetrator of the attack, a 21-year-old Tunisian.

Unremitting efforts to combat extremism

Paris has taken measures to control terrorism in the country and confront it in all respects. It has sought to dismantle extremist organizations, such as the Baraka City association, as it has ties to extremist currents.

In October 2020, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin visited Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, and presented the authorities with a list of their citizens who are in France illegally and are suspected of being extremists, and France wants to expel them.

According to the French Ministry of the Interior, there are 231 foreigners in the country illegaly who are on the list of extremism, and among them are about 60 Tunisians, 60 Moroccans and a number of Algerians. France considers deporting them as a priority.

Demands to dissolve Union of Islamic Organizations

On the level of the French street, a number of French public figures launched an open letter signed by parliamentarians and from local elected councils, political elites, intellectuals and activists from civil society organizations, calling for the dissolution of the Brotherhood-affiliated Union of Islamic Organizations in France.

French President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Jean Castex, and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin called for the dissolution of the extremist organization in order to preserve the values of the secular and democratic state in the face of terrorism and extremism.