‘There are 1,514 lawless neighborhoods on French territory,’ claims ex-intelligence service chief

A soldier patrols at the Gare de Lyon train station in Paris. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)
By Thomas Brooke
3 Min Read

Approximately 6 percent of the French population resides in lawless neighborhoods outside the sphere of civilized society, a former head of France’s intelligence service has revealed.

Alain Chouet, the former Directorate General for External Security (DGSE) — France’s equivalent to the United States’ CIA and Britain’s MI6 — offered his thoughts on the current demographic across France in an interview with Oumma, a French-language publication concerned with the Muslim perspective on current events.

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The former security services chief was asked about the content of his new book, Seven Steps to Hell, which reveals Chouet’s concerns about the security deficit that exists in certain regions of France, as well as the ghettoization, lack of diversity and violence that is prevalent in the many no-go areas of the country.

“Forty years of blindness, ignorance, cowardice and ‘well-meaning’ have gradually led France to the limits of breaking the republican pact.”

Alain Chouet, “Seven Steps to Hell

“There are 1,514 lawless neighborhoods on French territory that are prohibited from access by the security forces, the emergency services, medical and social services,” the ex-DGSE chief told the publication.

“These districts are established on the territory of 859 municipalities and bring together approximately 4 million inhabitants. It is therefore almost 6 percent of the French population who live outside the law and outside the cultural and political practices of the national community,” Chouet revealed.

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The former security chief explained how many of these ghettos had been established back in the 1970s following wide-scale immigration to France from Northern Africa, where due to the economic slowdown of France, immigrants were unable to assimilate into society through traditional methods such as employment.

Despite the threat of radical Islam being on the decline across the world, according to Chouet, the danger from within is still prevalent across France, where individuals who have failed to integrate into French and Western civilized society continue to strike.

“The perpetrators of the many attacks we have experienced since 2015 are not — with the possible exception of the Bataclan assassins — foreign adventurers specifically trained to strike us in application of a particular strategy and according to precise tactics. They are children of our society, products of our social, educational and cultural environment, who spontaneously turned to violence after becoming radicalized in their corner for various reasons,” Chouet explains, warning that the Salafist threat from within will always exist until France attempts to “alleviate the problems of separatism within our society.”

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