MARSEILLE, FRANCE // The stream of would-be Islamists leaving Europe to fight in Syria or Iraq has left relatives distraught and authorities scratching their heads.
It also shows the success of recruiters’ efforts to persuade Muslims, usually young and sometimes recent converts to Islam, to overcome repugnance at ISIL brutality and join their cause.
New research in France reveals the extent to which teenagers, especially young women, are being lured to Middle East conflict zones.
Dounia Bouzar, founder of the CPDSI, a French body that provides a hotline for parents worried about sons or daughters indoctrinated – usually online – by Islamists, says many of the women attempt to join extremist groups for similar reasons: a sensitive nature, a desire for purpose in life and an ambition to work in professions such as medicine, nursing and social welfare.
Surprisingly, 70 per cent of parents contacting CPDSI’s hotline about daughters aged 14-21 who were “tempted by jihad”, described themselves as atheist.
Only 20 per cent were Muslims, the remainder a mixture of Catholics and even Jews.
"They [the girls] are often good students; we even have the case of one young girl who went to Syria just as she was supposed to be starting a course at Sciences-Po", a prestigious Paris university, Ms Bouzar told Le Nouvel Observateur news magazine.
About 100 girls and young women from France alone have travelled to join militants in Syria, a dramatic increase from the numbers last year.
Ms Bouzar says many of those who go to Syria quickly realise they are not there to play the humanitarian role they believed they would.
Anecdotal evidence cited by British media report suggests some girls who become disillusioned have been beaten by ISIL militants to deter dissent.
One teenager who tried to join ISIL, but was stopped before she could leave France, told Ms Bouzar about another ISIL method for discouraging defection.
“They place them in Turkey with the aim of getting them pregnant so that they are less able to save themselves because that would mean abandoning their babies,” she said.
A 15-year-old named Léa, a pseudonym, was prevented from joining ISIL when her parents, middle-class French atheists, discovered her plans.
She appeared before a juvenile court and was released under judicial supervision. But she continued to plan her departure until her online recruiters said it had become too complicated because she now had “too much baggage”, presumably the attention she had drawn from authorities.
Léa was told she could not travel to Syria but should instead carry out atrocities in France “à la Merah”, a reference to Mohamed Merah, who killed seven people, including three Jewish children, in a wave of attacks in 2012. It is likely, but not clear from what has emerged about her case, that her recruiters, who included at least one woman, were also French.
Detained for a second time, she appears to have renounced her previous intentions but her immediate fate rests in the hands of the French judicial system, which will seek to establish whether her professed deradicalisation is genuine.
UK officials have said that there are more than 500 British citizens involved with ISIL. Some analysts believe the number has risen above 1,000, highlighting how quickly the estimates can become outdated in the age of social media recruitment.
Muslim leaders in Europe have denounced ISIL’s beheadings of civilian hostages as un-Islamic and evil.
Yet, Léa told Le Nouvel Observateur the extremists' mantra depicted violence towards others, implying "non-believers", as legitimate self-defence.
In both Britain and France, hardly a week passes without some new account of young women as well as male recruits abandoning the security of home life in the hope of joining extremist groups.
On the French Riviera, even as Nice was engulfed by a wave of emotion over the murder of one of its citizens, Hervé Gourdel, a mountain guide decapitated by ISIL allies in Algeria, an extended family of 11 – including four children – was putting the finished touches to plans to travel via Turkey to join the group.
Relatives tried to alert the authorities but officials say they had no reason to act since no offence had been committed.
But what is it that blinds so many young recruits to the compelling evidence of ISIL violence?
"It is not happening is mosques," Harun Khan, deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, told The National.
“What we face is a phenomenon of communications and propaganda spread through social media. But I would say many simply lack any real knowledge of Islam. It is almost the same as joining a sect or cult and there is this macho gang attraction.”
Professor Peter Neumann, director of the London-based Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, said hundreds of ISIL sympathisers who decided not leave Britain after coalition airstrikes on the group began could still be a threat to their own countries.
In the past few days, his analysis may have been proven accurate.
Four men were detained in west London in what Scotland Yard described as “an “Islamist-related” plot, reportedly involving plans to spread terror to the capital’s streets.
One of the four, a medical student who had spent time in Sudan and then, allegedly, with ISIL militants in Syria, was reported by British media of having tweeted as he returned to the UK shortly before his arrest: “Oi lads … I smell war.”
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
* With additional reporting by the Associated Press
