PARIS — The case file of the French homeboys who joined the Iraqi jihad contains a startling photo.
It's the mug shot of Salah, the alleged point man in Damascus, Syria, who authorities say arranged for guns and safe passage into Iraq for extremists from Paris. Salah has a serious expression beneath a short Afro-style haircut. He looks as if he's posing, reluctantly, for a middle school yearbook.
When Salah left for Damascus with the jihadis last summer, he was 13 years old.
"He's just a little kid!" exclaimed Ousman Siddibe, a leader of Good Boys of Africa, an African-French community association in Paris' Riquet neighborhood. "We have some husky guys around here, but he's not one of them. And he's got an innocent face."
Salah, the son of African immigrants, remains a fugitive two months after police here broke up the alleged terrorist cell. His odyssey is a drastic example of a trend, investigators say: Not only are Islamic extremists in Western Europe radicalizing faster, they are also younger than ever.
"The trajectory is changing," said Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania and a former CIA officer. "Extremism is now appealing to younger and younger people."
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the thousands of militants from around the world who flocked to Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and to the wars in Chechnya and Bosnia-Herzegovina, were mostly in their 20s and 30s. In his book profiling 172 jihadis of that era, "Understanding Terror Networks," Sageman found a median age of 26, as "most people joined the jihad well past adolescence."
In the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the Iraq war, however, the process of radicalization has spread and speeded up. At an age when angry teens in Los Angeles drift into street gangs, some of their peers in Europe plunge into global networks that send them to train, fight and die in far-off lands.
"Iraq is the motor," said a senior French anti-terrorism official, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. "It's making them all go crazy, want to be shaheed [martyrs]. The danger of suicide attacks in Europe and the United States increases as you have younger guys who are fervent and easily manipulated."
Along with longtime resentment and alienation experienced by some in immigrant communities, technology such as computers and Arabic-language satellite TV plays a major role in molding militants earlier, European officials say. Internet sites and chat rooms have become a virtual sanctuary, widening access to propaganda and training materials for an emerging "second generation" of extremists.
