COMPARISONS with the Gaza Strip sprang to mind after midnight yesterday in the Cité des 3,000 at Aulnay-sous-Bois, a big council estate on the front line in the week-long battle of the northern Paris suburbs.

A fire at a warehouse shrouded the streets with acrid smoke. Nervous riot police loitered by charred cars, on alert for the steel boules that are a favourite projectile for the young rebeux (Arabs) and blacks in the nearby tower blocks. Hooded teenagers dashed from the darkness to hurl stones, then vanished with police in pursuit.

Down the street from the hulking estate a Molotov cocktail set a Renault ablaze, adding to the night’s score: more than 600 vehicles incinerated across the Paris region.

In the suburb of Sevran a middle-aged disabled woman was doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire while travelling on a bus. She was taken to hospital with severe burns.

There were 85 arrests and five businesses burnt, and, for the first time, the rioting spread to the provinces, with youths burning cars in Dijon, Rouen and Marseille.

Yet the Government voiced some relief because the violence was lower than recent nights in Seine-Saint-Denis, the département whose identifying number, 93, is a synonym for France’s ethnic and social ills. Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, and Nicolas Sarkozy, his deputy and rival, took that as a sign that one of the worst outbreaks in two decades of periodic ethnic discontent may be cooling .

For all the spectacular fires, the unrest is not an insurrection. Libération mocked foreign media for exaggerating it into “une Intifada de le 93”. There have been few pitched battles since the riot in Clichy-sous-Bois nine days ago after the accidental deaths of two boys. The violence has been more of a guerrilla game, teenagers taunting police and wrecking with abandon.

Trying to take the drama out of Aulnay’s misfortune, Gérard Gaudron, the centre-right Mayor, said that the wreckers were not all voyous (louts), the term that M Sarkozy uses to brand the rioters. “Some come out to have fun,” he said. “Instead of playing with their PlayStation, they hit the police.” Fun is not a word readily associated with Aulnay’s cités, the bleak blocks that look as if they have been transplanted from Moscow or Mexico.

Half of France’s seven million residents of African and Muslim descent live in grim estates such as these. Many of them are second or third-generation immigrants from former French colonies. In the 1950s and 1960s there was work for them, but not any more.

They are the last to get what few jobs there are. Unemployment on the estates is up to three times the national average. Rejected by France, the disaffected young inhabit a no man’s land, increasingly influenced by radical Muslim preachers.

In these euphemistically named “sensitive districts” nobody believes that President Chirac’s team will do more than its predecessors to relieve the grievances that have festered for decades. “They are revolting against injustice and the revolt will only spread if nothing is done,” Stomy Bugsy, a rap singer and one of the few celebrities to emerge from the estates, told The Times.

“They are also being stupid. I used to do my bit of wrecking but not in my own district, where you burn your neighbour’s car and set fire to your supermarket.”

M Sarkozy and M de Villepin have turned increasingly to mediators known as big brothers — men from the estates who try to calm the violent jeunes and act as go-betweens with the authorities. These men make no bones about the depth of despair on the estates.

Magid Tabouri, 29, leader of a group of youth workers at Bondy, next to Aulnay, said he was suprised that the eruption had taken so long. “It has been simmering with all the exclusion, mistreatment and social misery and collapsed education,” he said. “These families have been forced to the margins and are being kept there. It’s a gangrene that has grown for years. We will soon be seeing urban guerrilla war.”

M Tabouri reserved his harshest words for M Sarkozy and his campaign against the “scum” of the estates. He also deplored the failure of left-wing governments to confront the rejection of the immigrant generations. He suggested a small start: the police should be barred from using the informal and disrespectful tu that they routinely apply to young residents of the estates.

M Tabouri shares widespread unease over the appearance of Muslim preachers as mediators. Pictures of imams soothing rioters have played into the hands of the far Right. Bruno Gollnisch, deputy leader of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, said: “The supposed mediation of big brothers crying out Allahu Akbar (God is greatest) is one sign among many of the capitulation of the legitimate authorities.”

M de Villepin has been consulting mayors and promising urgent measures to alleviate the unhappiness of the banlieues. Shaken by the spreading unrest, he has put aside his feud with M Sarkozy over how fiercely to impose the law.

But last night the police were streaming back into le neuf- trois by the busload as rioters again took to the streets. Hooded youths fired shots at a vandalised bus, set warehouses ablaze and attacked an ambulance crew. By midnight disturbances were reported in three regions outside Paris.

THE RECKONING

143 people detained since riots began

85 arrests made on Thursday night in Paris

1,100 vehicles burnt in total (estimate)

500 vehicles burnt on Thursday night alone

29 buses set on fire

8 shops set on fire

5 public buildings

2 police officers set alight

35 police and firefighters hurt

4 police and firefighters shot

70,000 urban violence incidents reported this year

750 areas deemed sensitive urban zones

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