NICE // The alarming success of ISIL in recruiting teenage girls, often from non-Muslim middle-class homes, is highlighted in a new French film on which work began three days after last November’s massacre in Paris.
In a country beleaguered by repeated extremist attacks and the threat of more, Le Ciel Attendra (Heaven Awaits), which will be shown in French cinemas from Wednesday, is attracting huge attention.
It has even caught the interest of the French education ministry, which arranged pre-release viewings of the film for high school students in major cities across the country.
The film describes the lives of two girls, aged 16 and 17, who are radicalised online by ISIL recruiters who convince them they will find utopia by joining the extremist group. One of the girls ends up being arrested while trying to travel to Syria, and the other eventually begins a laboured process of deradicalisation.
Both characters are fictional but the director Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar says they are an amalgamation of real-life cases she encountered while carrying out research with Dounia Bouzar, a half-Algerian anthropologist who specialises in radicalisation. Ms Bouzar, whose Centre for the Prevention of Sectarian Abuse (CPDSI) helps families resist or deal with radicalisation, plays herself in the film – despite being initially reluctant.
Sandrine Bonnaire, who plays the mother of one of the girls depicted in the film, says that she too was hesitant about accepting the role, not least because she spent much of her childhood being cared for by a family of Muslim neighbours.
“But I could see the script contributed to challenging links between the religion of Muslims and Islamist fanaticism,” she says. “The family that, to a large extent, brought me up were faithful, respectful and open to others. It was they who taught me all I know about Islam and it was clear the film showed, too, that Islam has nothing do with Daesh.”
An estimated 40 per cent of French nationals who try to join ISIL are female, according to government statistics. Recent high-profile incidents show young women to be increasingly among them.
Ms Bouzar’s group says 70 per cent of the families who contact its hotline with concerns about female relatives aged 14 to 21 describe themselves as atheist. And in sharp contrast to the more common route of young male recruits into extremism, from delinquency and poverty in immigrant-dominated housing estates, these girls and women often show academic promise and come from professional families.
Despite ISIL’s barbarity, including the keeping of women and girls as sex slaves, the group’s propaganda techniques seduce young women with the idea that they will be treated as “precious” if they travel to Syria and Iraq, according to counter-terrorism specialists.
In interviews, Ms Mention-Schaar draws parallels with religious and secular cults that attracted disaffected young people in the late 1960s. These include, most notoriously, the Charles Manson commune. Some of the commune’s members, including several young women, obeyed Manson’s orders to commit a series of murders in California.
Statistics first published by the French newspaper Le Figaro but since repeated by other French media suggest 1,954 young people in France are currently considered to have been radicalised by ISIL, 121 per cent up on the figure for January. Young women are now “more likely than boys” to be indoctrinated, according to the same source.
When a group of young women were arrested last month, accused of planning terrorist attacks in Paris, the suspected leader was only 19. Her father had previously been suspected of holding extremist views but was quickly eliminated from the investigation, having reported missing the car his daughter and others had allegedly planned to explode in a central Parisian location.
Another member of the group, Sarah Hervouet, now 23, came from a non-Muslim family living in the town of Cogolin, which neighbours the Riviera resort of Saint-Tropez.
Her mother had previously told a local newspaper of her despair at being unable to prevent her daughter’s radicalisation, which had led to a failed attempt to join ISIL in Syria three years ago. Ms Hervouet is accused of having become “engaged” to two French extremists online – first to Larossi Abballa, who killed a policeman and his partner, also a police officer, in June, and then to Adel Kermiche, one of two men who murdered a Catholic priest during morning mass in July.
Ms Mention-Schaar says she watched ISIL propaganda videos of “unbearable violence” in order to “understand the strength of the grip the recruiters have on teenagers”.
“It is impossible, rationally, to conceive how one can laugh at a clip where jihadists play football with severed heads but that is what happens to some,” she says.
“It shows the extent their heads and their hearts have been disconnected.”