France's plans to deal with Islamic State's 'child assassins'

ItIt was apparent confirmation of a fear that the French security services have harboured for nearly three years. The jihadist Jonathan Geffroy, originally from Toulouse in south-west France, had been expelled from Turkey on September 11th, 2017, and picked up by the French domestic intelligence agency the DGSI. In custody the man who now calls himself 'Abu Ibrahim-al-Faransi' acknowledged that he had fought for Islamic State in Syria. But that was not all he said.

Before being placed under formal investigation for “terrorist conspiracy to carry out attacks on people”, this father-of-two told investigators that Islamic State were planning attacks in Europe carried out by specially-trained children. He said IS believed teenage killers were harder for the security forces to spot than their jihadist fathers. The Frenchman also claimed that there were several terrorist training camps for children in Iraq and Syria.

A senior intelligence officer notes that, so far, Geffroy is the “only person to have made such comments” while a judicial source says that “all of his declarations should be treated with caution”. Nonetheless, French antiterrorist officials are treating as serious a threat that has a worrying precedent.

After his arrest in Paris on August 11th, 2015, the jihadist Reda Hame claimed he had been ordered to commit a massacre at a music venue and had warned his questioners about future attacks. “I can tell you it's going to happen very soon. It was a real factory over there, and they were really looking to strike in France or Europe … the people are getting ready over there.” Just three months later came the November attack on the Bataclan music venue in Paris and the accompanying massacres on the streets of Paris.

Mediapart understands that the French intelligence agencies do indeed consider the return of minors to the country to be a “risk”, because of the military training that some of them received before the fall of the self-styled caliphate. They are also aware of the potential danger from youngsters who have stayed in France as, as with adults, there is a home-grown threat too. On January 16th, 2018, a 17-year-old Muslim convert, who was flagged because of his proselytising on social media, was picked up by the DGSI. Questioning and various searches revealed he had wanted to carry out an attack in France.

In another worrying case, on March 2nd, 2018, an Islamic State follower and two other men were convicted at the Old Bailey in London after the court heard that they had tried to create an “army” of child jihadists to attack sites in the British capital. Police said that the ringleader had attempted to radicalise 110 children, many aged 11 to 14.

The prosecution authorities in Paris, aware that “the theme of minors is of major concern for years to come”, are said to have changed their policy at the start of 2018. Instructions have apparently been given to issue arrest warrants for minors aged 13 (the youngest age allowed under French law for warrants) who have been in Syria and Iraq and who have to be placed in custody upon their return. The judicial source cited earlier says that this response is “not new”. They also said that in cases where there are sufficient suspicions, children aged ten to 13 can also be questioned and detained for up to 12 hours, a period which can be renewed once.

These measures have not yet been used for minors coming back from Syria. “The average age of returnee [children] is six,” says the senior intelligence official cited earlier. Only two were aged 13 or above. Another source says those two were girls returning with one of their parents. A third source told Mediapart of “two minors who returned who were of an age to have fought” though it was not possible to confirm whether this referred to the two girls. These two minors were questioned after letters rogatory had been issued but were not formally held in custody. Their questioning did not find any wrongdoing on their part.

So far just one case has raised concern in France. This involved a child of 11 who recently returned to France after his family were wiped out during a bombing raid in Syria. The boy said he had learnt how to assemble and take apart a Kalashnikov rifle from his father. He denies having learnt how to fire a gun but admits he has seen many execution videos involving Islamic State executioners. According to a police source, because of his young age “his attachment to jihadist ideology remains difficult to establish”.

During his final audience before MPs at the National Assembly on February 14th, 2017, the then boss of the DGSI Patrick Calvar - it is now led by Laurent Nuñez - had already raised the alarm over the phenomenon of Islamic State child killers, when he stated that their “indoctrination and their training made them human bombs”. He told MPs of videos shot in Syria which showed children aged five “cutting prisoners' throats or emptying [gun] magazines into prisoners' heads”.

One of the four wives of the jihadist recruiter Kevin Guiavarch, from Brittany in western France, revealed during questioning in October 2016 that the children were involved in training and teaching centres known as “mouaskars” where they were trained to become “killing machines”. One of these camps on the banks of the River Euphrates was called the 'Osama Bin Laden' training camp. Another was called the 'Abu Musab al-Zarqawi' camp after the founder of the Iraq branch of Al Qaeda, the forerunner of Islamic State.

Right up until the fall of the caliphate child fighters aged seven to 17 were, according to a DGSI report dated October 28th, 2016, enlisted in the Ashbal al-Khilafah or 'Cubs of the Caliphate' brigades where they were given “intensive” military training. The children were paid 50 dollars a month each and at the end of their training the best fighters were attached to IS military units and sent to the front. The intelligence services estimate that some 60 or so of the around 600 young French children who have been to or are still in Iraq or Syria belonged to these groups. It is not known if these figures include the children who are “presumed dead” in the bombing and fighting in the region.

Several French youngsters have indeed perished in the fighting, for example two brothers aged 12 and 14 who were apparently killed around Kobane in northern Syria the spring of 2015. Meanwhile out of a family of nine children who went to Syria in the summer of 2014 four brothers are said to have died fighting; two young adults and two aged 13 and 15. Sources have given conflicting figures on the true death toll, with between 20 to 50 young French citizens apparently having died in the region.

Terror propaganda

In February the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, based in The Hague, produced a report called 'ISIS Child Soldiers in Syria' which detailed children's training in the Osama Bin Laden camp. The first week's training consisted of “assembling, de-assembling, and maintaining AK47” weapons. They then moved on to target practice and the best were selected to go for further training as snipers. There was then three days of instruction in using grenades, plus advice on what to do on a battlefield. The youngsters were also “instructed to go for 2 to 3 days without food as they continue their training”.

In the fourth phase of training children were trained on using explosive belts and about the different forms of improvised explosive devices or IEDs, including information on how to connect cables and when to hit the switch. The report adds: “For children who fall behind during their various courses (sharia, guns and rifles, and physical training) ISIS prepares them to be suicide bombers.”

In a report in Le Figaro on March 2nd, 2018, some youngsters who had fought for Islamic State spoke about their ordeal from the confines of the detention and rehabilitation camp in Iraqi Kurdistan where they are now being held. Dressed in a PSG tracksuit Adel, 18, said: “They gave me a uniform, a Kalashnikov. I learnt to assemble explosives, weapons, to fight.” Mustafa, 17, was sitting on a plastic chair as he described how he was ready to die for the cause.

On February 27th, 2018, a propaganda video showed around 20 Uyghur children from central Asia training at a military camp. According to a specialist in analysing jihadist videos they were learning hand-to-hand fighting and how to disarm an opponent. One scene shows the instructor helping a child who failed with their first attempt.

In its issue published on March 16th, 2017, the Islamic State's Arab language propaganda magazine Al-Naba devoted an article to an institution for children on the Syrian-Iraqi border. The writer highlights the determination of the group to indoctrinate children despite the military pressure it is under: the aim being to train “lion cubs” and “heroes”. The organisation took in a maximum of 80 children aged 10 to 14, chosen from some 200.

On April 29th, 2016, Islamic State broadcast for the first time video footage of a religious song or “amasheed” sung in French by a child. In fact, right until the end of its caliphate Islamic State was keen to highlight the role of children. For example in October 2017 the person who uses the pseudonym 'Historicoblog' on social media published analysis on his blog of some young Uzbeks, sons of a jihadist who had been killed, leaning how to control weaponised drones. The message was clear: they were ready to take over from their father.

A note from France's domestic intelligence agency the DGSI dated October 28th, 2016, highlights the efforts made by IS's propaganda to encourage “the recruitment of child fighters” through the broadcast of online videos of videos of very young soldiers. “The message conveyed is twofold,” says the DGSI report. “On the one hand these videos show the ability of Islamic State to take in, supervise and train, militarily as well as religiously, the descendants of members of the organisation. On the other, it's about sending a message to Western countries showing the caliphate's enduring nature and ability to regenerate, thanks to new fighters who may be young but who are powerful and experienced. They are often shown being struck by adults with bare hands or a stick that they break, to show their resistance and their desire.”

A whole new level of horror was reached with the growing number of propaganda videos in which young children take part as executioners in filmed executions. As Mediapart revealed at the time, a video broadcast at the end of December 2016 showed four children under the age of ten in a building crowded with prisoners whose hands were handcuffed behind them but who were free to move. The children, dressed in military battledress made to their size and equipped with GoPro video cameras and handguns, made their way through the building, killing the prisoners one by one. “A PKK collaborator”, “two members of the army” of Bashar al-Assad's regime and a “collaborator of the Jordanian secret services” say the words in Arabic on the screen of this macabre film. It is a startling image: a unit of professional killers aged under ten with all the reflexes and reactions of veteran soldiers.

A few months earlier another video highlighted the sons, aged eight and 12, of a French jihadist who died at Aleppo in 2013. The children make threats against France, practice shooting at effigies of French politicians including François Hollande, then the president of the Republic, and then execute two prisoners from the Syrian regime.

On August 26th, 2016, yet another video showed the execution of Kurdish prisoners by five children of different nationalities, British, Egyptian, Kurdish, Tunisian and Uzbek. Armed and in combat uniform, one of the children delivers this message: “No one can save the Kurds even with the support of America, France, Britain, Germany, the devils in hell.”

There are also videos in which young children are seen carrying out decapitations.

Kalashnikovs given to children as presents

In jihadist mythology Rayyân Adil came to represent the ideal 'Caliphate lion cub' after a video was broadcast on March 10th, 2015, showing this child - then aged just 12 - putting a bullet in the head of a suspected spy for Israel's secret service Mossad. This was under the direction of his stepfather Sabri Essid, a member of the Islamic State's secret services and former mentor and brother-in-law of Mohamed Merah, the man who killed three soldiers, a Rabbi and three Jewish children in south-west France in 2012.

The images from this video went around the world. They are loaded with meaning: they suggest a continuation of Merah's hateful work and, most particularly, a child's attachment to the ideology of their stepfather, with religion appearing stronger than blood ties.

Despite his age, the video led to an international arrest warrant being issued for Rayyân Adil. It will almost certainly never be required. On the morning of February 3rd, 2018, the youngster is reported to have died in a bombing raid, according to an unofficial Islamic State publication monitored by the expert on jihadist movements Romain Caillet. This new online publication waxed lyrical about the glory of this teenager “loved by all” and, in line with standard jihadist mythology, it said he was generous to believers who were poor and determined in the face of the infidels' armies. The article was entitled: “The highest level of Paradise”.

On February 3rd, 2015, a month before Rayyân Adil's infamous video, the Islamic State had already sought to showcase the role it wanted its children to play. But the message was too subtle and was misinterpreted in the West. In the video Faites exploser la France – acte II ('Blow Up France – Act II') seven hooded men with light machine guns congratulate themselves on the recent attacks on French soil and call on Muslims in France to carry out further attacks.

Alongside the large men staring out from under their hoods stands a much smaller figure, the only one with a military-style hood. Various media believed this to be the frail figure of Hayat Boumeddiene, widow of Amedy Coulibaly, who went to Syria a few days before her husband attacked the Jewish Hyper Cacher store in Paris in January 2015. She was said to have become involved in the fighting in Syria and Iraq. This “news” led to Hayat Boumeddiene being portrayed as a member of the self-styled Caliphate's religious police the Hisba. However, it was not her in the photo and Islamic State had not meant to highlight her role as a widow-turned-fighter. Instead it had intended to underline the role of its “lion cubs”.

For after the media hype had died down the DGSI managed to identify several of the people in the video. In particular they identified the speaker in the middle of the shot thanks to the model of the watch on his right wrist, which has a compass showing the direction of Mecca and an alarm system indicating the different prayer times. It transpired that the smaller figure on his left is his nephew, a 15-year-old who was later shot in the face and wounded on the battlefield. He has similar eyes and the same look as Boumeddiene.

It was one of his aunts, during questioning by the French authorities, who formally identified the youngster. Meanwhile the DGSI believes that the person on the right of the speaker was the teenager's father, a former ally of Chérif Kouachi, one of the attackers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015. So the video depicts the teenager with his father and uncle. The message – which was lost on the West at the time – was that this was a jihadist family and that the Caliphate was being handed on from one generation to another.

For in addition to the Islamic State's well-oiled propaganda machine, indoctrination also takes place within the family unit. “The children are exposed to war games from an early age,” notes the DGSI report from October 28th, 2016, which states that “real or fake Kalashnikovs” are given by parents to their children “in the guise of presents”. The adults apparently take “particular care” to train their youngsters in using these assault rifles.

Military conditioning starts from a very young age. There exists an image of a youngster aged about two, armed with a combat knife, cutting the head off his teddy bear. There have also been reports of children of a similar age “rolling around on the floor because they couldn't see their decapitation videos, which they're used to seeing all day”, according to Patrick Calvar during his hearing at the National Assembly. Jihadists' phones and computers have revealed photos of masked fighters posing proudly with their young children, who are also hooded and armed.

The family life of one jihadist family was described by a Frenchwoman who took the name of Oum Shéhérazade when she converted to Islam before changing it again during the course of three successive marriages to Islamic State fighters. Originally from Montceau-les-Mines in the Saône-et-Loire département or county in central eastern France, she was questioned by the authorities when she returned to France and spoke in minute detail about her marital odyssey. She met her last husband after looking after his 11-year-old son – originally from Alsace in northern France – when he went off to fight at the battlefront. The youngster became fond of the woman and eventually she married the father.

“We lived like a normal family,” she said, “apart from the fact that my husband took Idriss to shoot on the shores of a lake. Lots of fighters met around this lake to learn to shoot and my husband taught Idriss to shoot several weapons, then he sent me photos of the little one via software...”

The police questioned Oum Shéhérazade about photos of severed heads they had found on her smartphone. “Idriss took them with my telephone,” she replied. “It was as the beginning of 2015, I don't know what these [decapitated] people had done. I can tell you that the children also made a video with the head, they had fun with it but I deleted it...”

She said Idriss “was not armed” but “adored” executions. “His favourite video was the one of the Jordanian pilot who was burnt,” she added, referring to the pilot whose F-16 fighter crashed near Raqqa, then Islamic State's headquarters in Syria, and who was burnt alive in a cage in January 2015.

She said her 11-year-old stepson “would like to kill people”. Shéhérazade said: “Once, in around September 2015, Daesh [editor's note, an Arab name for Islamic State] carried out casting for a video. Idriss was not selected and he was very disappointed. It was two other little French boys who were chosen to do a video execution.”

A glimmer of hope

The security services and justice system do not on the face of it consider the 70 children who have already returned to France to be a security risk, because of their young age and gender – girls did not get military training. But between 500 and 600 children are still said to live in the Syrian-Iraqi zone, and as Mediapart has already revealed, 32 French children have been taken prisoner either by the regular Iraqi army or by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The question arises as to their eventual return one day to France.

In his evidence to French MPs the then-boss of the DGSI Patrick Calvar expressed his concern on the issue. “When there are more of these children we're going to have to face up to a social problem of large-scale proportions,” he said, and called for a major policy initiative to deal with the issue. “You can't fight terrorism just by security measures, because you risk not treating the causes of the ills and seeing it get worse.”

His views have been echoed by his successor, Laurent Nuñez, who in an interview with Le Figaro talked of “teenagers who had taken part in fighting” and also younger children who showed signs of “worrying traumatism that it will be imperative to treat to avoid any move to action at a later date”. The new head of the domestic agency has a reassuring message, however: “Some inter-ministerial measures have been put in place to this end.” Such youngsters are being provided with special education “after a psychological assessment”.

When they return to France children are left with their mother once she is judged able to look after them, not just materially but also when the authorities are sure that she no long subscribes – or never did – to jihadist ideology. Otherwise the children are entrusted to members of their family who “are not involved in jihadist networks” or, if no suitable family members are around, they are placed in foster homes. According to the La Dépêche du Midi newspaper, that was what happened to the two children of Toulouse jihadist Jonathan Geffroy, who had himself criticised the use of children to carry out attacks.

Contacted by Mediapart, Geffroy's lawyer Audrey Dufau did not want to comment on the claims made by her client in custody. However, she did attack the circumstances surrounding the children being put into foster homes and the fact that their parents, both of whom have been placed under formal investigation, have no visiting rights. “In a context when the children's educational and emotional situation is of concern for obvious reasons, and when all should rightly be done to maintain family links, the parents' rights have not been acted upon by the [editor's note, child services] Aide Sociale à l'Enfance who have charge of them. There has been no contact between the parents and children since September [2017] even though there are no judicial or procedural obstacles to this,” she said.

Around thirty children have already been put under the control of the judiciary via the Protection Judiciaire de la Jeunesse (DPJJ) department of the Ministry of Justice. There have been some hopeful signs of success. In what was generally a very critical report of the existing policies to de-indoctrinate and find a place for jihadists in France and Europe as a whole, green senator Esther Benbassa, who has had a blog on Mediapart, and Catherine Troendlé from the conservative Les Républicains, praised programmes such as the “educational apartment” initiative in Saint-Denis in the Paris region.

Under this programme children live in an apartment without their family but in permanent contact with a therapist and an educational expert. Three minors who have been placed under investigation for terrorist-related acts are currently in this accommodation. “Although the timescale is not long enough to evaluate the measure,” the senators wrote in their report in July 2017, “professionals from the Protection Judiciaire de la Jeunesse as well as magistrates from the antiterrorist section at the Paris Prosecutors' office have indicated that the initial results have shown themselves to be very positive, particularly as their care is completely individualised and personalised.”

The senators said they wanted the remit of the Protection Judiciaire de la Jeunesse to be broadened so that the care of radicalised youths did not stop after a few months. “The idea is to stop the fact that all monitoring ends when the subject becomes an adult,” said Catherine Troendlé.

So far the intelligence services have detected no incidents caused by minors who have returned from Syria and Iraq, even if several of them have serious behavioural problems after what they have seen and experienced.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

• The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter