On a recent morning in Marseille, children walking to school found the charred remains of Adel, a 15-year-old, lying on the beach as if at rest. His parents were on their way to report him missing.
He had been killed in the city’s signature style: a bullet to the head, his body doused in petrol and set alight.
The murder, recorded and shared on social media, is the latest in a grim series of executions that mark the rapid and brutal evolution of Marseille’s drug wars. Violence is now increasingly random, fueled by online provocation and defined by the growing recruitment of children into the trade.
“It’s chaos now,” said a gang member in his early twenties, who calls himself “The Immortal.” He lifted his shirt in a nearby park to reveal the scars of four bullet wounds from a rival hit.
“I’ve been in [a gang] since I was 15. But everything has changed. The codes, the rules—there are no more rules. Nobody respects anything. The bosses use youngsters. They pay them peanuts. And they end up killing others for no real reason. It’s anarchy, all over town.”
According to France’s Ministry of Justice, the number of teenagers involved in the drug trade has surged more than fourfold in the past eight years.
What was once a criminal underworld governed by brutal but predictable codes has fractured into a fragmented, social media-driven conflict where children are both perpetrators and victims, and no one is safe.
By James Kisoo
