France says it has plans to set up 1,500 isolated jail places for radicalized inmates as the European country hardest hit by Takfiri terror attacks prepares for the return of its nationals from the Middle East, where they were fighting alongside Daesh terrorists.
The decision to boost the capacity of French prisons is part of a 60-point national plan announced by Prime Minister Edouard Philippe on Friday to confront the threat of radicalization.
“Radicalization is a menace for our society,” Philippe said in the northern French city of Lille where he presented the plan. “This is a plan of mobilization … It’s a battle the state alone cannot fight.”
“No one has a magic formula for ‘deradicalisation’ as if you could de-install dangerous software,” the French prime minister added. “But in France and elsewhere there are good approaches to prevention and disengagement.”
Reports indicate that a total of 512 people are currently incarnated for terrorism-related charges in France and a further 1,139 prisoners have been identified as being radicalized.
Philippe said 450 of the 1,500 lodgings for radicalized inmates would be ready by the end of this year.
Apart from the additional prison capacities, the French premier also stressed the need to focus on education as a means of preventing the radicalization phenomenon.
Philippe said French school teachers would receive more training on how to detect signs that their pupils were becoming radicalized, and local authorities would be required to enhance their scrutiny of the small but growing number of private schools involved in the spread of extremism.
The plan is the third in less than four years in France, aiming to draw lessons from the past failures after a series of terrorist attacks left over 240 people dead in the European country.
Official government reports said a total of 323 French nationals or residents, including the 68 children, had returned to France from war zones in Iraq and Syria and all of them had been subject to investigations by the public prosecutor. A further 1,180, including around 500 children, are still there.
The Takfiri terrorist outfit first emerged in Syria and later expanded its campaign of terror to neighboring Iraq, managing to seize large swathes of Syrian and Iraqi land with some 20-thousand foreigners joining the terrorist group in the two countries.
It took three years for the Syrian and Iraqi national armies to fully liberate their land from the clutches of the world’s most notorious terror group.
This is while many in France blame the Paris government’s foreign policy for the outbreak of conflicts and the ensuing emergence of militant groups in the Middle East and North Africa.
After Daesh’s fall in the Middle East, its remnants have been flowing to Afghanistan, where the terrorist outfit has been actively recruiting and expanding its foothold since 2015.
According to international and Afghan sources, French citizens have been spotted among the terrorists operating in northern Afghanistan.