Jihadi hotbed on the Riviera

Nice, the glitzy French Riviera resort city where a Tunisian truck driver killed 84 people last week, has a flip side — as a breeding ground for jihad, experts say.

About 200 youths from Nice have traveled to Syria, they say. And a top Syria-based recruiter of French jihadis hails from Nice.

There are also 15 to 20 makeshift prayer rooms in the city preaching radical messages to Muslims living in the city’s margins, says Yasmina Touaibia, a political scientist at the Nice law school.

“We let these groups proliferate silently . . . and today [they] have created networks and are rooted in a number of neighborhoods,” she said.