The Irresistible Romance of Jihad

"Everything was calculated. They did everything so that she could plan to the smallest detail."
"I never heard her talk about Syria, jihad. It was a though the sky fell on us."
Severine Ali Mehenni, Lezignan-Corbieres, France

"Girls aren't there for combat, just for marriage and children. A reproduction machine."
Foad El-Bahty, Avignon, France

"It is not at random that these girls are leaving. They are being guided."
"She was being commanded by remote control. And now she has made a trip to the pit of hell."
Guy Guenoun, lawyer, France

Sahra, freshly 18 years of age, lived with her Algerian immigrant family in the ancient French town of Lezignan-Corbieres with its ten thousand population in the south of France, a region famed for the excellence of its red wine. Her father, Kamel Ali Mehenni, an industrial chemist, works at a local wine factory. Not a very religious, but a loving family.

Kamel and his wife Severine hardly knew what to think when their daughter insisted she wanted to wear the full Islamic veil, and when she dropped out of school and shut herself up in her room with her computer. Latterly, she asked her mother's help in securing a passport, explaining that this would represent her growing-of-age maturity, all her paperwork in order.

In this Thursday, Oct. 2, 2014 photo, Kamel Ali Mehenni, left, and his wife, Severine, 

hold pictures of their daughter Sahra at their home in Lezignan Corbieres, France. At 

left is a frame grab taken from a security camera showing Sahra at the Carcassonne 

railway station on March 11, 2014, the day she left her home on her way to Syria. 

(photo credit: AP Photo/ Fred Scheiber)

How could any loving, unsuspecting parents imagine that their second child would harbour a secret urge to escape her life, leave all that was familiar behind, embark on a furtive mission to find a new life, one the daughter felt would have meaning and purpose of a kind her parents would never understand, let alone agree to. Sahra was right; her parents would not understand and certainly would never agree with her plans.

Sahra made her preparations, resorting to throwing any possible suspicion off scent, informing her parents of her intentions in a manner completely different to what she was actually planning. She would be busy, engaged in innocent social interactions with her friends, just casual matters that  young girls value.

When her father questioned her about the bulky bags she was preparing to take with her to school she responded with an explanation that appeared reasonable; extra things to be taken along to teach her friends how to wear the veil. Her father drove her as usual to the train station and would pick her up after school. She called her mother at lunchtime to give assurances, but Sahra was in Marseille at the airport awaiting a flight to Turkey.

Three days later Sahra called her frantic parents from Syria, informing her older brother she was now married, to a 25-year-old Tunisian she met for the first time on her arrival. Since that time in March her parents have spoken with her twice. On their daughter's Facebook page there are now links to videos about Islamist jihad featuring guns, blood and martial music. Evidently all the exciting things she had watched at home on her computer.

Nora El-Bahty, the 15-year-old daughter in a Moroccan immigrant family of six children was recruited on Facebook. Again, her Muslim parents were not very religious in their outlook. Nor were they ever aware that their daughter was fascinated with what she saw on the Internet, but they are aware now, after the fact. They know their impressionable daughter was obviously fascinated with the videos of veiled women firing machine guns; alternately Syrian children slaughtered in conflict.

The videos she so avidly watched repeatedly made reference to France's law banning the veil and limiting the use of headscarves in public. That awakened the rebellion in a romantic teen-age girl's awakening consciousness of the wider world and where she might possibly fit into it; the world of revolutionary Islamist jihad.  So romantic. She left for school in January and that leaving was final, much to the shock and helpless dismay of her family.

Her older brother Foad discovered that his little sister had taken to veiling herself as she travelled to school. She had a second phone number, a second Facebook account, and it had been targeted by recruiters. "As soon as I saw this second Facebook account I said, 'She's gone to Syria'", he recounted. Through the following police investigation the family discovered the travel arrangements that took their daughter to Syria.

She took a high-speed train to Paris, flew from there to Istanbul, then to a Turkish border town using a ticket booked by a French travel agency. A young woman had paid for everything, had given her overnight accommodation in Paris, and said she would travel with her, then abandoned the trip, leaving Nora to travel on her own. From Syria, Nora contacted her family on Facebook, three days after her departure.

"There was a woman behind her who was telling her what she needed to say. ... Everything this woman said, my sister repeated it. And all the girls who are leaving for Syria, they are saying the same thing. Word for word. They have a script: 'I'm good. I'm eating well. I'm going to paradise.'"

In Aleppo, she was babysitting Syrian children of jihadis, and she was, she informed her family, happy there. According to her brother Foad, she was meant to be married off, but had objected and one of the emirs intervened, and for the time being she remains single. But in mid-March, Nora said she wanted to come home. Phone calls were few and far between. Her brother  secured an agreement to visit her in Syria.

When he arrived, he said, his sister was living in a house with several women and children, all locked up and held against their will, Foad says. When saw him she broke down weeping. She informed him she had gone to Syria because she thought it was her duty to help suffering Muslims. Once she arrived, she was informed she would not be allowed to leave.


That some Muslim girls find the idea of jihad romantic and feel compelled to join the 'movement of freedom for pious Muslims', can perhaps be understood. The pull and compulsion of being part of a historical transition. And then comes the realization that all is not as it seemed. There are said to have been at least one hundred young French girls of Muslim heritage who have departed for Syria.

Among them a Jewish girl.