The French Children France Doesn’t Want

What’s more, after this summer’s snap elections, Macron is a lame-duck president, initially forced into cohabitation with a minority right-wing coalition government, having rejected the progressive parties’ candidate for prime minister. That government collapsed in early December. The next parliamentary elections are widely expected next summer. As unforgiving as Macron’s France has been with the stranded women and children, an even more severe policy would be expected under a Le Pen government. The question of the children’s return grows ever more urgent. Matters are further complicated by the fall of Bashar Al Assad’s regime, which for the moment has deepened the uncertainty surrounding the detainees’ future.

One of the most striking phenomena of the rise of ISIL in 2014 was its transnational appeal: An estimated 53,000 men, women, and minors, including 40,000 fighters, were said to have joined ISIL forces. Up to 4,761 of the foreign volunteers were women; another 4,640 were minors. These volunteers and their families hailed from 80 to 110 countries, spanning the borders of the Islamic world and beyond. Around 6,000 came from Western Europe, 7,000 from Eastern Europe and Russia, and 750 from the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Of the Western contingent, around 40 percent were women and minors. The largest group by far were the French: Approximately 1,900 joined ISIL. A Collectif representative confirmed to me that the relatives of those members represented in his association span “all of France’s class, ethnic, geographic, and religious backgrounds.”

One ISIL Frenchman was Patrick Pascal (all names of the family members have been changed). Patrick was born and raised in a middle-class, mixed-faith Parisian household. Both parents were educators. Pierre, the father, was born in French Algeria to a Pieds-Noirs family of Protestant and Roman Catholic stock. Patricia, the mother, is partly of Jewish heritage and lost an aunt to the Nazis during the wartime occupation of France. The family would spend the school year in Paris and summers in a holiday cottage in the countryside, a short drive away from the beach. Today, both are retired and in their sixties, with the gentle manner common to many grandparents, except that their four grandsons are detained in a Syrian camp. When I first visited them this past summer, they were busy packing bags for a third trip to Syria, where they would visit their daughter-in-law and grandchildren. “This was not what we imagined when we said we would travel once we retire,” Pierre quipped, “yet here we are.”