Gilles Le Guen seemed like France's worst nightmare. He was a white Frenchman who could move around the country at will and had pledged his loyalty to al Qaeda's branch in North Africa. He had even fought alongside the jihadists during their occupation of northern Mali. But the story may not be so simple: Al Qaeda began to suspect that he was, in fact, a spy sent by France to infiltrate its ranks, and it launched an investigation to determine his true loyalties.
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We know all this from a handwritten 10-page document in Arabic left behind by the extremists in the legendary northern Malian town of Timbuktu as they fled an impending French attack in January.
The document shows that Europeans did join al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), but that the organization's leadership treated these "white al Qaeda" with the utmost suspicion. Particularly following a Danish convert's deadly betrayal of al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, the terrorist group has good reason to be suspicious of white jihadists. The same applies in Syria, where hundreds of fighters with European passports -- Arabs and converts -- are joining extremist opposition groups.
Almost all jihadi fighters who conquered Timbuktu in March 2012 were Arabs from Algeria, Morocco, Mali, or Mauritania. They were turban-wearing, battled-hardened men belonging to AQIM who waged their jihad in one of the most unforgiving places on Earth -- the Sahara, the world's largest desert.
Among this hardened group of fighters, Le Guen stood out. He was a convert to Islam, a former ship captain, an ex-employee of Doctors Without Borders, and he carried a French passport. He and his Moroccan wife arrived in Timbuktu shortly before the town was captured by AQIM and its local Malian partner, Ansar Dine. As the extremists approached Timbuktu, many black, non-Arab Malians and Western tourists fled in panic. But Le Guen and his wife chose to stay.
The Frenchman immediately joined al Qaeda's desert force. Le Guen's comrades even gave him an Arabic nom de guerre: Abdul Jalil al-Fransi, or "Abdul Jalil the Frenchman." In Timbuktu, he received military training from AQIM and recorded a video message in French in support of the group's holy war. The video of Le Guen sitting next to a Kalashnikov appeared on YouTube on Oct. 9, and he looked every bit the confident Islamic warrior.
One month later, however, Le Guen was in trouble -- serious trouble. His new friends had heard from an al Qaeda fighter that Le Guen received a telephone call from the French Embassy in Mali's capital, Bamako. This, of course, raised suspicion among AQIM ranks: Was Abdul Jalil al-Fransi a true jihadist, or was he a French spy?
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