Oumar Diaw (Jihadi Militant, France)

• Full name: Oumar Diaw
• Pseudonym: Abu Baru
• Alternatives: N/a
• Location: Syria, Iraq, fmr France
• Affiliation: Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [DaIISh]

Oumar Diaw (°ca 1981) was a jihadi of Senegalese descent who grew up in the Schiltigheim suburb of Strasbourg.¹ As a young man, he frequently ran into trouble with police for drug offenses, gang activity, traffic violations and violent acts.² In 2010, Diaw was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for narcotics trafficking. During his incarceration, he showed no signs of radicalization, but Diaw quickly turned to Islam upon his release. He is said to have radicalized through the internet.³ Diaw began sharing jihadi propaganda on social media and is thought to have associated with other radicals in the Strasbourg metropolitan area, including Lakhdar Sebouai.⁴

In the spring of 2014, Diaw traveled to Syria and joined the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [DaIISh; Dawlat al-Islamiya fi-Iraq wal ash-Sham].⁵ He settled in Raqqa and linked up with Sebouai.⁶ From Syria, Diaw rallied support of the DaIISh. In November 2014, he posted a video on social media in which teenaged French jihadis called on Muslims to join the organization.⁷ Diaw later published another video in which he praised the January 2015 attack on the offices of a satirical magazine in Paris.⁸ In March 2015, Diaw began a brief romantic affair with Claire Khacer, a radical Islamist who had come over from France with her children.⁹

Apart from propagating for the DaIISh, Diaw also took part in the organization’s offensives in Kobane and Mosul. During one of these actions, he got shot through the cheek.¹⁰ Diaw later became a guard at one of the DaIISh’s prisons. He earned a reputation for torturing captives and was even alleged to have murdered a Syrian army general in the group’s custody.¹¹ Diaw maintained close relations to other French jihadis in the service of the DaIISh, including the Strasbourgeois militant who would later blow himself up at a concert hall in Paris in November 2015.¹²

Diaw was furthermore connected to efforts by the DaIISh to launch attacks in France and actively recruited fighters in the country through the internet. In December 2015, he was rumored to have planned an attack on the Christmas market in Strasbourg, but nothing happened.¹³ Diaw developed a close relationship with Inès Madani who served as one his relays in France and helped him built a small network of radical Muslims willing to go fight in Syria or carry out attacks in Europe.¹⁴ In September 2016, she and her associates were arrested as they tried to blow up a vehicle in the city center of Paris. Diaw also guided the Strasbourg-based Bousseria and Makran Cell [CBM] in the development of another plan to wage terror in the French capital.¹⁵ He has furthermore plotted with Hicham al-Hanafi to launch a simultaneous operation.¹⁶ The concurrent projects were thwarted by French security services in November 2016.

By the time French authorities had successfully prevented Diaw’s attacks, he was already rumored to have been killed in an air strike in Syria in May 2016.¹⁷ His death was never confirmed. The French government issued an international arrest warrant for him on Dec. 02, 2016.¹⁸​