Panic in France as children fall victim to deadly violence by Marseille drug gangs

Warning: This article contains disturbing details from the beginning.

A group of children saw Adel’s body on the way to school, just as their parents were heading to the police station to report him missing. A grotesque, charred silhouette, reclining, with one knee raised, as if resting on one of the nearby beaches of Marseille.

He was 15 when he died, in the usual way: shot in the head, then they poured gasoline on his thin corpse and set it on fire.

Someone even filmed the beach scene, the latest in a grim series of shootings and then burnings linked to the rapidly evolving drug wars in this port city, increasingly fueled by social media and now marked by chilling random acts of violence and the growing role of children, often forced to participate in trafficking.

“It’s chaos now,” said a skinny gang member, lifting his shirt in a nearby park to show us a torso scarred by at least four bullets, the result of an assassination attempt by a rival gang.

The French Ministry of Justice estimates that the number of teenagers involved in drug trafficking has more than quadrupled in the last eight years.

“I have been in [a gang] since I was 15 years old. But now everything has changed. The codes, the rules… there are no rules anymore. Nowadays nobody respects anything. The bosses are beginning… to use young people. They pay them pittance. And they end up killing others for no real reason. “There is anarchy throughout the city,” said the man, now in his early 20s, who asked us to use his nickname, The Immortal.

Across Marseille, police, lawyers, politicians and community organizers are talking about a psychosis – a state of collective trauma or panic – gripping parts of the city, as it debates whether to fight back with increasingly harsh police action or new attempts to address entrenched poverty.

“It is an atmosphere of fear. It is evident that drug traffickers dominate and gain more ground every day,” said a local lawyer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals against her or her family.

“The rule of law is now subordinated to the gangs. Until we have a strong state again, we have to take precautions,” he said, explaining his recent decision to stop representing victims of gang violence.

“There is so much competition in the drug trade that… people are willing to do anything. That’s why we have 13 or 14-year-old children who come as lookouts or traffickers. Young people see dead bodies, they hear about them every day. And they are no longer afraid of killing or being killed,” community organizer Mohamed Benmeddour told us.

The trigger of the Marseille current psychosis was the murder last month of Mehdi Kessaci, a 20-year-old police trainee with no ties to drug trafficking. His death is widely believed to have been a warning to his brother, a 22-year-old prominent anti-gang activist and aspiring politician named Ahmed Kessaci.

Now under close police protection, Kessaci spoke to the BBC about Mehdi’s death and the guilt he feels.

“Should I have made my family leave? [Marseille]? “The fight of my life will be this fight against guilt,” he said.

Ahmed Kessaci first rose to national prominence in 2020, after his older brother, a gang member named Brahim, was also murdered.

“We’ve had this psychosis for years. We have known that our lives hang by a single thread. But everything changed since Covid. The perpetrators are getting younger. The victims are getting younger,” he said.

“My little brother was an innocent victim. There was a time when real bullies… had a moral code. You don’t kill during the day. Not in front of everyone. You don’t burn the bodies. First you threaten with a shot in the leg… Today all these steps have disappeared.”

Citing the current “unprecedented” levels of violence, French police are responding with what they call security “blitzes” in high-crime areas of Marseille.

Although one gang, the DZ Mafia, now appears to dominate the trade, it operates a kind of franchise system, with a fragmented network of small distributors often staffed by teenagers and undocumented immigrants, who clash violently over territory.

According to one estimate, up to 20,000 people may be involved in the city’s pharmaceutical industry. Last year, officials seized €42m (£36m) in criminal assets from the gangs.

Video images shared on social media routinely show gang members, armed with automatic rifles, shooting at each other in various areas of Marseille. cities – poor neighborhoods characterized by high-rise buildings and a concentration of social housing.

On a cold afternoon last week, we accompanied a group of armed riot police on one of their usual “bombing” missions.

The officers quickly drove to a ruined apartment building in their vans, while a young gang lookout at the door quickly fled on foot. Divided into two groups, the police ran to both sides of the building looking to catch the dealers on the stairs.

“The objective is to dismantle drug sales points. We have closed more than 40 of them… and we have locked up many people,” explained Sébastien Lautard, head of the regional police.

“Turn him around,” one officer snapped, as his team pinned an 18-year-old against a door.

In a nearby dirty basement, police found dozens of vials and small plastic bags used to distribute cocaine. A police officer later explained that the young man they had detained was begging to be arrested, saying that he had arrived in Marseille from another city and was now being held against his will and forced to work for a drug gang.

The agents took him away in a van.

“This is not El Dorado. We have many young people recruited on social media. They come to Marseille thinking they will make easy money. They are promised 200 euros ($233; £175) a day. But it often ends in misery, violence and sometimes death,” said the city’s chief prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone.

In his office near the city’s old port, Bessone described an industry believed to be worth up to €7 billion nationwide and characterized by two new developments: a growing emphasis on online recruitment, sales and delivery; and a growing number of teenagers forced into the trade.

“Now we see how traffickers enslave these… little soldiers. They create fictitious debts for them to work for free. They torture them if they steal 20 euros to buy a sandwich. It is ultraviolence. The average age of perpetrators and victims is getting younger,” Bessone said.

He urged the local population not to succumb to a psychosis but “react, get up.”

The lawyer who asked us to conceal her identity described a case she had handled.

“A young man who absolutely did not want to be part of a network was detained after school, forced to participate in drug trafficking, raped, then threatened and then his family was also threatened. All means are used to create a workforce,” he said.

On Tiktok, dozens of videos, accompanied by music, announce the sale of medicines in Marseille. cities“from 10:00 to midnight”, each product with its own emoji, for cocaine, hashish and marijuana. Other advertisements seek to recruit new gang members with messages such as “hiring a worker”, “€250 for lookouts”, “€500 to carry drugs”.

For some local politicians, the answer to Marseille’s problems is a state of emergency and much stricter rules on immigration.

“Authority must be restored. We need to put an end to a culture of permissiveness in our country. We need to give more freedom, more power to the police and the judiciary,” said Franck Alissio, a local congressman for the far-right populist National Rally party and a possible candidate for mayor.

Although the ancient Mediterranean city of Marseille has been known for centuries for its large immigrant community, Alissio argued that “today the problem is that we are no longer able to integrate economically and assimilate. There is too much immigration. It is the number [of immigrants] that’s the problem. And in fact, the drug dealers, traffickers, lookouts, the leaders of these mafias, are almost all immigrants or foreigners with dual nationality.”

It is a controversial claim that is difficult to verify in a country that takes pains to avoid including such details in official figures.

Alissio claimed that successive governments had invested billions of euros in Marseille’s poorest neighborhoods to no effect. He blamed parents and schools for allowing children to get into the drug trade, but added that his goal was to “solve the problem, not do sociology.”

Far-right parties have long enjoyed strong support across southern France, but less so in the diverse city of Marseille. Critics of the RN, such as the lawyer whose identity we have hidden, accused the party of “exploiting misery and fear” and of wrongly blaming immigrants for a “gangrene” widespread in all communities in France.

Philippe Pujol, a local writer and expert on drug trafficking in Marseille, was also offered police protection following the murder of Mehdi Kessaci last month.

“I’m not sure there is a good reason for this terror. But… terror is taking hold. I would rather be afraid and careful than take unnecessary risks,” he said.

But he responded to calls for tougher police action, arguing that it was simply a matter of addressing the symptoms “of a suffering society” rather than addressing the causes of the problem.

Describing entrenched poverty as a “monster,” Pujol painted a picture of a society radicalized by decades of neglect.

“The monster is a mixture of clientelism, corruption and political and economic decisions taken against the public interest,” Pujol said.

“These kids can be idiots when they’re in a group, but when you’re alone with them, they’re still kids, with dreams, who don’t want this violence.”