France’s Special Forces Hunt French Militants Fighting for Islamic State

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The motive for the secret operation is to ensure that French nationals with allegiance to Islamic State never return home to threaten France with a terror attack, said a current and a former foreign-affairs adviser to the French government. France has been the target of several deadly attacks either inspired by Islamic State or orchestrated from the militants’ Middle East strongholds, including the November 2015 Paris strikes. French government spokesman Christophe Castaner Wednesday said, “I say to all the fighters who join (Islamic State) and who travel overseas to wage war: Waging war means taking risks. They are responsible for those risks.”

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A senior Iraqi police official showed The Wall Street Journal a list of names of 27 suspected Islamic State members sought by France, accompanied by photos of five of the men. French special forces began circulating the document at the start of the Mosul offensive last year. It is updated as men are killed, the police official said. One man was identified on the list as “Badush,” and the document described him as last seen in July driving a white Kia in northern Mosul, wearing traditional Iraqi clothing. Several of the names included aliases that linked the men to France— Abu Ismael al-Fransi and Abu Souleyman al-Fransi —or to Belgium, where some of the Paris attackers were from. Belgium’s Defense Ministry declined to comment.

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“They are dealing with them here, because they don’t want to deal with them at home,” said a senior Iraqi counterterrorism officer directly involved in coordinating with the French special forces. “It’s their duty. It’s common sense. The most lethal attacks overseas were in France.” Iraqi government officials said their military doesn’t participate in systematic extrajudicial killing of Islamic State fighters, and any such cases would be investigated for possible prosecution.

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