Andrew HardingParis equivalent, Marseille
WARNING: This article contains shocking content from the beginning.
While Adele’s parents were heading to the police station to report her missing, a group of children discovered Adele’s body on their way to school. The grotesque, tanned silhouette raises one knee and reclines, as if relaxing on one of Marseille’s nearby beaches.
He died as usual when he was 15 years old. He put a bullet in his head, then poured gasoline on his slender corpse and set it on fire.
Someone even filmed the scene on the beach. It is the latest in a series of grim shootings linked to this port city’s rapidly evolving drug war, increasingly fueled by social media and now characterized by horrifyingly random acts of violence and the growing role of children, often forced into drug dealing.
“I’m confused now.” a scrawny gang member said in a nearby park, lifting his shirt to show us his torso with at least four bullet holes. This is the result of an assassination attempt by a rival gang.
The French Ministry of Justice estimates that the number of young people involved in drug dealing has more than quadrupled over the past eight years.
“I’ve been in (a gang) since I was 15. But now everything has changed. Codes, rules – there are no rules anymore. Nobody respects anything these days. The bosses… start taking advantage of the young people and pay them peanuts. And they end up killing other people for no reason. The whole town is anarchy,” said a man in his early 20s who asked us to use his nickname, The Immortal.
Across Marseille, police, lawyers, politicians and community organizers psychosis – A collective trauma or panic grips parts of the city, debating whether to fight back with tougher police measures or new attempts to tackle deep-rooted poverty.
“A climate of fear has been created. It is clear that drug traffickers have the upper hand and are gaining more ground every day,” said a local lawyer who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals against his family.
“The rule of law has now been subordinated to the gangs. We must take precautions until we are a strong nation again,” she said, explaining her recent decision to stop representing victims of gang violence.
“There is so much competition in the drug trade… people are ready to do anything. So we have kids as young as 13 or 14 coming in as spotters or dealers. Young people see dead bodies and hear about it every day. And they are no longer afraid of killing or being killed,” said Mohamed Benmeddour, a community organizer.
The moment that sparked Marseille’s trend psychosis Last month, the murder of 20-year-old trainee police officer Mehdi Kessaci, who had no connection to the drug trade. His death is widely believed to have been intended as a warning to Ahmed Kessaci, a prominent 22-year-old anti-gang activist and aspiring politician.
Kesachi, who is now under close police protection, spoke to the BBC about Mehdi’s death and the guilt he feels.
“Should I leave my family (to Marseille)? The struggle of my life will be the struggle with guilt,” he said.
Ahmed Kessaci first rose to national prominence in 2020 after his brother Brahim, also a gang member, was killed.
“We’ve been through this psychosis For many years. We know that our lives hang on one thread. But after Corona, everything changed. Perpetrators are getting younger. “The victims are also young,” he said.
“My brother was an innocent victim. There was a time when real thugs… had a moral code. You don’t kill, not even in the daylight. Not in front of everyone. You don’t burn the body. You shoot them in the leg first and threaten them. Today, those steps are all gone.”
Citing today’s “unprecedented” levels of violence, French police are responding with what they call a security “bombardment” of high-crime areas in Marseille.
Currently, one gang, the DZ Mafia, appears to dominate the industry, but operates a kind of franchise system and operates a network of small distributors, often made up of teenagers and undocumented immigrants, who clash violently over territory.
One estimate suggests that up to 20,000 people work in the city’s pharmaceutical industry. Last year, authorities seized €42m (£36m) in criminal assets from the gang.
Videos shared on social media routinely show gang members armed with automatic rifles shooting at each other in various parts of Marseille. quotation – A poor neighborhood with high-rise buildings and social housing.
One cold afternoon last week, we accompanied a group of armed riot police on one of our routine “bombing” missions.
Officers sped into a dilapidated block of flats in a van, and the young gang, who had been watching at the gate, immediately fled on foot. The police divided into two groups and ran to both sides of the building, catching the dealers on the stairs.
“The goal is to disrupt drug trafficking venues. We have closed more than 40 of them and locked up many people,” explained local police chief Sébastien Lautard.
As his team pinned the 18-year-old against the door, the officer bluntly told them to “turn him around.”
In a dirty basement nearby, police found dozens of glass bottles and small plastic bags used to distribute cocaine. A police officer later explained that the young man they had detained had come to Marseille from another city and was now pleading for arrest, saying he was being held against his will and forced to work for a drug gang.
The police took him away in a van.
“This is not El Dorado. There are many young people recruited through social media. They come to Marseille thinking they can make easy money. They are promised 200 euros ($233, 175 pounds) a day. But it often ends in misery, violence and sometimes death,” said the city’s prosecutor, Nicolas Bessonet.
From his office close to the city’s old port, Bessone outlined an industry thought to be worth up to €7 billion nationally and featuring two new developments. There is a growing emphasis on online recruiting, sales and delivery. And more and more teenagers are being forced into the trade.
“Now we see how traffickers enslave these little soldiers. They create imaginary debts to get them to work for free. They torture them if they steal 20 euros to buy a sandwich. This is extreme violence. The average age of perpetrators and victims is getting younger,” Bessone said.
He urged local residents not to give in to the incident. psychosis Instead, it’s about “reacting and getting up.”
The lawyer, who asked that his identity be withheld, described the cases he handled.
“A young man who did not want to participate in the network at all was arrested after school, forced to participate in drug dealing, raped and threatened, his family was also threatened. All means were used to create a workforce,” she said.
On Tiktok, dozens of videos set to music advertise drugs sold in Marseille. quotation“10:00 to midnight”, each product has its own emoji for cocaine, hashish and marijuana. Other advertisements attempt to recruit new gang members using messages such as “Recruiting Staff”, “Surveillance Fee €250” and “Drug Transport Cost €500”.
For some local politicians, the solution to Marseille’s problems is a state of emergency and much stricter immigration rules.
“The mandate must be restored. We must end the culture of tolerance in our country. We must give the police and judiciary more freedom and powers,” said Franck Alissio, a local councilor and mayoral candidate for the populist far-right National Rally.
The ancient Mediterranean city of Marseille has been known for centuries as a large immigrant community, but Alisio argued that “the problem today is that we can no longer integrate and assimilate economically. There are too many immigrants. The problem is the number of immigrants. And in fact, the drug traffickers, the dealers, the guards, the leaders of these mafias are almost all immigrants or foreigners with dual citizenship.”
This is a controversial claim that is difficult to verify in a country that strives to keep such information out of official figures.
Alissio claimed that successive governments had poured billions of euros into Marseille’s poorest neighborhoods to no avail. He criticized parents and schools for allowing children to become involved in the drug trade, but added that he was focused on “solving problems, not studying sociology.”
Far-right parties have long enjoyed strong support across southern France, but not in the diverse city of Marseille itself. Critics of the RN, such as a lawyer whose identity we have withheld, have accused the party of “exploiting misery and fear” and wrongly blaming immigrants for the “gangrene” that is widespread in all communities in France.
Local writer and Marseille drug trade expert Philippe Pujol also received police protection after killing Mehdi Kessaci last month.
“I’m not sure if there’s a good reason for these attacks, but… terrorism is rampant. It’s better to be fearful and cautious than to take unnecessary risks,” he said.
But he countered that stronger police action was needed, arguing that it would merely alleviate the symptoms “of a suffering society” rather than treat the cause of the problem.
In depicting deep-rooted poverty as a “monster,” Pujol painted a picture of a society radicalized by decades of neglect.
“The monster is a mixture of patronage, corruption and political and economic decisions that are against the public interest,” Puyol said.
“These kids may be stupid in groups, but when they’re alone, they’re still dreamy kids who don’t want violence.”
