2023-12-13 00:09:50
During the 1990s, Al Qaeda recruitment networks attracted young Europeans of Arab origin to training camps located in countries such as Afghanistan. They did it hidden from the eyes of the world, but everything changed with the attacks of September 11, 2001. Many of those young people recruited by Islamist terrorism ended up locked up in Guantánamo and other places of detention, where the United States applied different types of torture and He violated the human rights of those detained, with the alibi of the fight against terror. The French cartoonist and journalist Jérémie Dres (1982) has recently told the story of two of those young people, Mourad Benchellali and Nizar Sassi. He has done it in a diptych, The day I met Bin Ladenpublished in 2023 in Spain by the Garbuix Books publishing house.
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In conversation with this medium, Dres explains that, at first, his intention was to do it as a single book, “but my editor wanted me to finish it in 2021, coinciding with the anniversary of 9/11. However, I was still halfway through the job. “We came to the solution of publishing the story in two books.”
His interest in the story of Mourad and Nizar, who traveled with false promises to Afghanistan to be trained as terrorists, arose at a time when Jérémie Dres was hooked on the news about French Muslim boys who went to Syria or Iraq to do Jihad (holy war). “It was 2015 or 2016 and that was a big problem, it was in the news all the time,” recalls the cartoonist. “That’s how I came across a podcast in which Mourad and Nizar were interviewed, recorded in 2009 on French public radio, in a very popular program. That interview was done before Daesh, before many young people left for Syria, in another context,” explains Dres.
When they were captured and imprisoned in Guantánamo, in 2003 and 2004, their story received great media attention, “but then interest decreased,” says the author. “No one cared too much about them, until that interview in 2009, when he rescued his story. I discovered it in 2017, and it seemed incredible to me: 20 years ago the same thing that was happening in Syria had happened, only in Afghanistan. I saw that it was interesting to focus on this story, on the experiences that Mourad and Nizar had, who were among the first young French people from the suburbs to make this trip.”
A problem of social integration
The first volume of The day I met Bin Laden focuses on the recruitment of the two young men, their trip to Afghanistan and their experiences in the training camp. But, for Dres, it was important to also show the social causes of this phenomenon. “These kids feel that they are second-class citizens, that they do not have the same rights as others, that the police are persecuting them. It is a problem of social integration and having real job possibilities. It is not the exclusive responsibility of the Government, but it could do more than it does to help these young people. “We have a lot of young people from these suburbs who do not feel integrated into French society, and the solution they find is to get drunk and get into trouble,” explains the author, who remembers that last summer there were riots in several suburbs because the police killed to a young man by mistake.
“I’m a little pessimistic because the problem is still there,” says Dres. “Mourad and Nizar are today two intelligent people who have reflected and understand perfectly what they did and know that it was wrong. But there are still a lot of Mourads and Nizars out there, who are not integrated into society,” he adds.
However, the lack of information also had an important influence on the story of Mourad and Nizar: “They were among the first young Muslims recruited. It’s hard to believe today, but at that time nobody knew anything about the Jihad, and they didn’t know where they were going. They were a bit naive. There was Mourad’s older brother, who was a radical, and was the main reason they made the trip. But for them it was a question of leaving those suburbs, where they do not have any kind of future perspective. For someone like Mourad, travel was a way to see new things and have adventures. He said yes, they gave him a fake passport and bought him plane tickets. It was very easy, actually, and that is the most disturbing thing,” Dres reflects.
Held in Guantanamo
In the second volume, the story leads Mourad and Nizar to be detained by the Pakistani army, to later be handed over to the United States and end up detained in Guantánamo. There, both suffered all kinds of torture and humiliation, and were interrogated again and again in the context of the investigations into the 9/11 attacks. There were clear violations of the human rights of those detained, some of whom remain in Guantánamo today awaiting trial.
Dres was able to interview Ali Soufan for his comic, a former FBI agent who was in Guantánamo, author of several books in which he recounts his experiences and analyzes how interrogation methods based on torture actually harmed the fight against jihadist terrorism. . “I get the impression that many Americans still don’t understand what they did wrong,” says Dres. “There were people who spent time in prison for their torture in Guantánamo, but, obviously, the most responsible have never gone to prison, as happens in all countries. Many have a very simplistic view: they were at war and they did what they considered necessary.” However, the author also indicates that other people are aware that human rights were violated in those prison camps. “These interrogation techniques are torture, and steps have been taken to prosecute the excesses, especially during Barack Obama’s mandate.”
Comic journalism
The work of Jérémie Dres is part of the tradition of journalistic comics, which are managing to narrate complex issues like this in a very effective way to reach the public, and show horrible events with the tools of drawing. “Of course, I knew Joe Sacco’s work,” acknowledges Dres. “It means a lot to me. At the age of 25 I read his works about Sarajevo and with him I discovered this type of comic, which fascinated me.”
However, the Dres comics do not follow the Joe Sacco model. “He focuses a lot on the details and the geopolitical context, and I like that, but it’s not very funny. If you are talking about the most serious and tough topics, readers may feel some rejection. That is why it is helpful to use a more cartoonish and simple drawing style,” explains the artist. “In that sense, I feel closer to Guy Delisle’s comics, which are lighter, with fun scenes, which I think make readers want to continue. I’m trying to explore a terrain between these two giants, Sacco and Delisle: I want to be as serious as the first, but also find fun spaces like those of the second,” concludes the author.
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