Belabbes Bounaga (Jihadi Militant, France)

• Full name: Belabbas Bounaga
• Pseudonym: “Abbès”
• Alternatives: N/a
• Location: Syria, fmr Malaysia, fmr UAE, fmr Algeria, fmr France
• Affiliation: Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [DaIISh]

Belabbas Bounaga (°1994) was a jihadi of Algerian descent from Alsatian town of Lingolsheim. He was raised as a non-practicing Muslim. As a teenager, Bounaga was already drawn to crime. He later became involved in the drugs trade and gained a reputation for aggression and hostility towards France.¹ In 2014, Bounaga was sentenced to a year in prison for an assault on a public transport inspector.² He turned to radical Islam during his incarceration.³ Upon his release, Bounaga spent several months in Algeria with his father.⁴

In the spring of 2016, Bounaga traveled to Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey from where he crossed into Syria somewhere before June 2016.⁵ Bounaga joined the ranks of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [DaIISh; Dawlat al-Islamiya fi-Iraq wal ash-Sham]. Little is known about his activities in Syria. In August 2016, fellow jihadis informed his mother that he had died in combat.⁶ His death was never officially confirmed and a French court later sentenced him in absentia to a ten-year prison term for his membership in a terrorist organization.⁷ In September 2017, Bounaga’s mother was sentenced to two years in prison for having financed terrorism through donations to her son. Her sentence was later suspended.⁸