FRENCH CHILDREN ADD TO ISIS RANKS / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

French Children Add to ISIS Ranks

Some young men and women leave France to start families in Syria, according to those who study the radicalization of French residents
    

By Noemie Bisserbe and Stacy Meichtry


The French government says about 50 children have been taken from France to Syria since 2012 and some have been put into ISIS training camps. Image: ISIS propaganda via Al-Furqa media.

 
 
NICE, France—Valérie Aubry-Dumont got the news in a WhatsApp message from deep inside Islamic State territory. “Mom, you’re going to be a grandmother,” wrote her teenage daughter, Cléa.

When Ms. Aubry-Dumont last saw her daughter, Cléa was a 16-year-old girl attending Catholic school in a Paris suburb. After a breakup, Cléa met a young man online and within months the couple fled France to live in a stretch of northern Syria ruled by Islamic State.

“I wish Cléa never had children,” Ms. Aubry-Dumont, a child-care worker, says now that her grandson has been born. Her daughter talks some days of returning to France, Ms. Aubry-Dumont said, but is afraid of losing her baby if she tries to leave. “She is trapped.”

In France, the West’s biggest supplier of foreign fighters in Syria, the loss of sons, daughters and grandchildren to Islamic State has been a slow-motion tragedy. For some French families, the Paris attacks, while deepening the wedge between militants and the West, were a painful reminder of their ties to the enemy.

The French wife of Foued Mohamed-Aggad—who along with two others killed 90 people in Paris’s Bataclan concert hall on Nov. 13—is living in Islamic State territory and ready to give birth “any day now,” said Françoise Cotta, a lawyer Mr. Mohamed-Aggad’s mother approached in an attempt to bring the child back to France.

“An alarming number of young men and women are leaving France to start a family in Syria,” said Alain Ruffion, director at Unimed, a group that works to prevent the radicalization of residents around the southern French city of Nice.

Raising children in Islamic State-held territory bolsters its ranks. More than 1,100 children under age 16 joined its training camps this year, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based opposition monitor. The alleged ringleader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had brought his 13-year-old brother to Syria to join the militants. Mr. Abaaoud was killed last month by police.

The number of children born of a French parent joined to Islamic State is nearly impossible to tally, authorities said. The French government estimates that about 50 children have been taken to Syria since 2012.

Among them was a 5th-grade boy named Rayan, who stopped showing up at his redbrick elementary school on the outskirts of Toulouse in April 2014. He resurfaced nearly a year later—in an Islamic State video.

Rayan appears clad in military fatigues, holding a handgun. At his side is Sabri Essid, a radical who married Rayan’s French mother and moved her and her four children to northern Syria, French officials said.

In the video, Mr. Essid calls Rayan a “lion cub” prepared to kill Islamic State enemies. An Israeli Arab hostage is shown kneeling before the boy. Moments later, Rayan shoots the hostage.                     

Last year in Nice, a French family of 11 people, including four children between the ages of 6 months and 6 years, left for Syria.

“I went to pick up my two grandsons at school as usual,” said Ivano Sovieri whose daughter, Andrea, married into the Muslim family several years ago. “But I was told the entire family had left for Tunisia after a relative died.”

Mr. Sovieri eventually learned his daughter, who converted to Islam, had gone to Syria. She left behind a message with her best friend: “I shouldn’t have left, but I couldn’t back down in front of Allah.”

Ms. Aubry-Dumont said she tagged along on the first date between her daughter, Cléa, and a young bearded man from a dating website. “Who’s this guy who won’t look me in the eye or shake my hand?” she recalled asking her daughter after the date in December 2012.

The couple disappeared a few months later. Ms. Aubry-Dumont said she later recognized her daughter’s suitor in a video posted by Islamic State. He called himself Abdul Wadud, and, brandishing a rifle, swore revenge against French President François Hollande.

Ms. Aubry-Dumont said she tried to persuade her daughter to come home. The teenager instead asked her parents to join her in Syria. “If it was dangerous here, I wouldn’t ask you to come,” Ms. Aubry-Dumont recalled her daughter saying. Eventually, the teenager told her mother why she wanted her: She was pregnant.

“I almost collapsed when I got the news,” said Ms. Aubry-Dumont, who was so angry she cut off communication. A few weeks later, when U.S. forces started airstrikes in Syria, a frantic Ms. Aubry-Dumont called Cléa.

The runaway couple and their son now live in a villa in northern Syria. “They are given everything they need,” Ms. Aubry-Dumont said, “a house, money and even formula for the baby.”

The two women now chat on WhatsApp and sometimes talk by phone. The daughter sends baby pictures. “I try to continue to play my role as mother, somehow,” Ms. Aubry-Dumont said.

Some grandparents weigh the risks of trying to see family members, including those they have never met. Beyond personal loss, these families face government surveillance and risk prosecution if they try to meet with their loved ones abroad.

Annie-Claude, a French retiree from the southern town of Avignon, said her son left home two years ago to join militants in northern Syria, where he fathered a child with a young Syrian woman. He was killed fighting for Islamic State in March, said Annie-Claude, who declined to give her last name.

A few months ago, the child’s widowed mother contacted Annie-Claude about meeting her new grandson. The Syrian woman suggested they rendezvous in Gaziantep, a Turkish town near the Syrian border.

“He’s all I have left from my son, and the only grandchild I’ll ever have,” Annie-Claude said. “I want to see him.”

Under Islamic State rules, the young woman isn’t allowed to travel without male guards, said Annie-Claude: “I want to go, but I’m scared.” France has banned travel to Syria and Iraq.

The 17-year-old Syrian woman who Annie-Claude considers her daughter-in-law speaks no French or English. The two women communicate via a mobile messaging service, trading emoticons: smiley or sad faces, puckered lips and hearts.

Zora, a shy junior-high student from a Paris suburb, left France after her 14th birthday, said her father, a vendor at a local market. She wound up in a villa in Deir Ezzour, near Syria’s border with Iraq.

Police later told her father she had been recruited over Facebook FB 0.37 % by three young women in southern France. The girl traveled to Syria on a circuitous route through Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey.

For months, Zora used the mobile messaging service Viber to communicate with her father. She described life in the villa that was home to about 50 girls from foreign countries including the U.S., U.K. and Belgium, said the father.

Surrounded by armed guards, the girls were rarely allowed to step out, the father said. Zora told her father she had been forced to watch beheadings. Bomb blasts woke her at night. “I can’t stop crying,” she wrote.

Six months ago, Zora’s text messages seemed more upbeat. “She talked about her plans for when she’d be back in France, asked for advice on which studies to pursue,” her father said. “When she was a little girl, she wanted to be a nurse. Now, she says she can’t see any more blood.”

The father pleaded with Zora to find someone who could arrange an escape. “I’ll pay anything,” he wrote. He sent a scanned copy of her French birth certificate to use if she managed to reach the Turkish border.

That was the last time he heard from her, he said. Standing in his market stall, he dialed his daughter from his cellphone. No one answered.

“I call every morning,” he said. “I’m waiting for her to get back online.”