A French Town Reels After Teenage Girl Vanishes, Apparently To Join Jihadists - NYTimes

12/1/2014
A French Town Reels After Teenage Girl Vanishes, Apparently to Join Jihadists - NYTimes.com
http://nyti.ms/12hzqbn
EUROPE
A French Town Reels After Teenage Girl

Vanishes, Apparently to Join Jihadists
By SUZANNE DALEY and MAA de la BAUME
DEC. 1, 2014
BETHONCOURT, France French intelligence officials got in touch with

the parents of a shy, 15-year-old Muslim girl in this depressed town in
eastern France last May to convey some shocking news: Their daughter had
become a frequent visitor to websites preaching jihad.
The parents asked the French authorities to take steps to block their
child from leaving the country and took possession of her passport,
according to local officials. In the months that followed, the girl showed no
sign that she intended to head for Syria or Iraq. She took off her veil to go to
school, as French law requires, and she spent her days close to her mother.
Then last month, she disappeared. The surveillance cameras in the
Mulhouse airport, 50 miles from her home, showed her moving confidently
and alone as she used her older sisters passport to fly to Istanbul and then
on to Gaziantep, a Turkish city known as the gateway to Syria for jihadists.
Government officials say they believe that the girl, whose first name is
Soukana but whose last name cannot be published under French law,
became one of the small but growing number of adolescent girls who,
seduced by Internet recruiters, have shown amazing determination in their
efforts to join Islamic jihadists.
While there is enormous concern for the fate of these young women in
Syria and Iraq, there is also a growing fear that the girls, far less likely to
draw attention from security officials than their male counterparts, could
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pose a significant risk in their home countries, primarily in Europe.

Another 15-year-old girl, who was intercepted by French intelligence
officers as she tried to go to Syria months ago, has since told the authorities
that once her recruiters realized she was unlikely to be able to leave the
country anytime soon, they began pressing her to strike at home against
Jews. She told them she had begun looking for weapons and targets.
So far, teenage girls hoping to join the jihadists cause have been
identified in a half dozen countries in Europe, and include three youths
traveling from America and arrested in Germany.
But experts say that the problem appears most severe in France, which
has a large Muslim population from the Middle East and North Africa and
where more than a hundred families have been talking to experts to help
them cope with their daughters growing radicalization.
Jihadists have been masterful at recruiting adolescents on the Internet,
experts say, reaching them first through exchanges over hair, makeup or
even something as banal as the best chocolate bar, before drawing them into
political discussions. They then show the girls heartbreaking videos of
violence against Muslims before eventually targeting them with offers of
marriage or the chance to do humanitarian work in support of an ideal,
religious society.
In Bethoncourt, where unemployment is more than 24 percent,
Soukana lived in a relatively isolated area of low-income housing projects.
Her neighborhood has only a small strip mall with two cafes frequented only
by men. Many of the older Arab women do not speak much French and
rarely leave their homes.
Friends say Soukanas parents understand little about the Internet, and
even after her parents started watching her more closely, she clearly
continued to plan her departure carefully. She went online at an Internet
cafe shortly before taking a taxi to the airport. On the day of her departure,
she told her parents she would eat lunch at school and spend the night with
a friend afterward.
She succeeded in putting everyone around her to sleep, even those who
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were closest to her, said Thrse Brunisso, the local prosecutor.

Her departure has left many in this struggling town stunned,
questioning how they could have been so blind to what was happening to a
timid, quiet young woman who liked to braid her friends hair and draw
ornate henna tattoos on their hands.
You see these things on television and you say, Well, that could never
happen here, " said Samia Messaoudi, a longtime family friend. The
parents who lived with her every day did not feel this coming. I know this
girl very well, I go to that house all the time. I never would have believed it
possible.
As with the young men who are leaving Europe to join the jihadists, the
young women seem driven in part by the difficulties of assimilating to a
culture that many consider hostile to their religion and an economy that
offers them little hope of a better life.
Once this small town thrived. But many of the Muslim families that
came here decades ago to work in a nearby Peugeot factory lost those jobs to
mechanization and never found other work.
The town, which has shrunk from a population of 11,000 to 6,000, is
sharply divided with a middle class, largely white population on one side
of the railroad tracks and a largely poor Muslim one on the other.
Everything was nice here until the 1990s, said Jean Andr, the mayor,
who blames the fact that there is little to do in the housing projects for the
restlessness of the towns youth. When they built them, they forgot that
human beings would be living there. There is no cinema there, no
entertainment. There is nothing for them there.
After the news of Soukanas disappearance, Mr. Andr sought out her
mother and went to visit her. It is hard to see such distress, he said. The
phone rings and she runs thinking it is her daughter. But it is not.
A Facebook page belonging to Hadda oum Soukana, a partly made-up
Arabic name, and through which her friends were contacted, had few
personal details. Her profile picture featured the Palestinian flag.
The 15-year-old who told the authorities she was pressed to attack Jews
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in France said she had already picked a location and figured out how to arm
herself before the police arrested her, according to Dounia Bouzar, an
anthropologist who founded an anti-radicalization center in Paris.
Ms. Bouzar said the girl had been encouraged to isolate herself from her
friends and family. She was also bombarded with Internet messages and
phone calls from people about the atrocities in Syria, and shown videos of
babies gassed by the government forces.
In the magazine LObs, the girl was quoted saying: Little by little I
stopped talking to people. I stayed in my room with the shutters closed. And
I signed on to the Internet.
Sasha Havlicek, the chief executive of the Institute for Strategic
Dialogue, a British research organization, said much of the recruiting
glorified the role of women as supporters.
One friend of Soukanas reached through Facebook said she suspected
that the recruiters had been able to tap into the resentment that some
Muslims feel in France, which has, for instance, put restrictions on women
wearing veils.
The fact that we cant live our religion the way we would like in France
might have been a factor, said the friend. The people who manipulated her
probably kept pressing that point, offering her a better life.
One adolescent from France, Nora, quickly contacted her family from
Syria saying she wanted to come home. Her brother, Fouad, traveled to
Syria to get her but was not allowed to bring her home. He said his sister,
deeply upset, had ended up babysitting for the children of jihadists.
He said that she appeared to be living well. All of her expenses were
paid for and she received an allowance of $70 a month. It all seemed
incredibly well organized. If ISIS saw a nice villa, they would just throw the
family out and live there themselves. These people played video games all
day.
Few in Bethoncourt want to talk about Soukana. Outside the mosque,
only one man would address the subject, saying that her departure had
tarnished the image of Islam.
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Ms. Messaoudi said Soukanas parents were still holding out hope that
she simply ran off with friends. Teenagers, Ms. Messaoudi said, were so
difficult to understand.
What they say to you, she said, is different than what they say to their
friends. You never know every facet of a teenager.
2014 The New York Times Company
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A French Town Reels After Teenage Girl Vanishes, Apparently To Join Jihadists - NYTimes

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A French Town Reels After Teenage Girl Vanishes, Apparently To Join Jihadists - NYTimes

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12/1/2014

A French Town Reels After Teenage Girl

BETHONCOURT, France French intelligence officials got in touch with

pose a significant risk in their home countries, primarily in Europe.

were closest to her, said Thrse Brunisso, the local prosecutor.

2014 The New York Times Company

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