France Struggles to Cope With Terrorism on Its Home Turf

Imad Djebali was long considered a threat to France’s national security. Well aware that he was wanted by authorities, Mr. Djebali was surprised that police were nowhere in sight—a full 19 hours after he’d landed back in France from a monthslong stay in an Islamic State stronghold in Syria.

A French national is a suspect in the May shooting at a Jewish
museum in Belgium, which killed four. Above, police stand
guard outside the museum where tributes were left. Reuters

Mr. Djebali and two companions instead went looking for their own pursuers. They ended up walking to a sleepy, small-town police station and ringing the doorbell.

“Nobody’s here,” Mr. Djebali told his lawyer, Pierre Dunac, over the phone as he waited for police from a neighboring town to arrive and eventually detain him.

As it turns out, the French police had been waiting for them a day earlier—and at the wrong airport, some 500 miles away in Paris.

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The debacle was “obviously a big mess,” French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said at the time.

Mr. Djebali’s odd re-entry reveals how European authorities are ill-prepared to cope with what they themselves have identified as a top security threat: scores of suspected militants who are flocking home from the front lines of Syria’s bloody civil war, replete with battlefield training and European passports.

In justifying his decision to launch airstrikes against Islamic State, French President François Hollande has warned the French public of “young men who are indoctrinated, brainwashed, and who can come back home with the worst plans in mind.” Islamic State has responded by calling on European nationals to mount terrorist attacks on their native soil.

And yet France—a country that has some of the continent’s toughest antiterrorism legislation in place, and has poured financial and military resources into combating Islamist insurgencies abroad—is straining to cope with new threats.

European capitals that pride themselves as bastions of human rights shun many of the measures the U.S. designed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to swiftly isolate national security threats, such as seizing people deemed “enemy combatants” and indefinitely detaining them without a swift trial.

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