According to press reports, a young Jewish girl is among one hundred of French teenagers who have fled France to join the terrorist Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.
The departures are less the whims of adolescents and more the conclusions of months of work by organised radical recruitment networks that specifically target young people in search of an identity.
Girls are also coming from elsewhere in Europe, including between 20 and 50 from Britain. However, the recruitment networks are particularly developed in France, which has long had a troubled relationship with its Muslim community, the largest in Europe. Distraught families plead that their girls are kidnap victims, but a proposed French law would treat them as terrorists liable to arrest upon return.
Many of the youngest female recruits are lured with promises of humanitarian work. It is only once in Syria that they discover their fate: forced marriage to a fighter, strict adherence to Islamic law, a life under surveillance and little hope of returning home, say parents, relatives and radicalization experts.
According to the EU’s anti-terrorism chief, Gilles de Kerckhove, the number of Europeans joining Islamist fighters in Syria and Iraq has risen to more than 3,000.
The EU is planning to step up border checks and passport controls to counter the threat of returning jihadist fighters.
“We may be faced soon with returns, huge returns from Syria and Iraq,” the EU’s counter-terrorism co-ordinator, Gilles de Kerchove, told journalists in Luxembourg earlier this week at a meeting of EU Interior Ministers.
He said the US-led airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) in Syria could prompt European nationals fighting alongside the jihadists to go back home.
“Airstrikes give incentive for more returns and therefore we have to be ready now to detect returns and be prepared”.
Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano, whose country currently chairs the EU Council, said: “The key issue is that we really need to step up border controls at our external borders.”
Initiatives include getting a controversial EU PNR (Passenger Name Records) bill in place before the end of the year.
The European Commission’s proposal for surveillance of internal EU flights has been stuck in the European Parliament for the past two years due to privacy issues.
Ministers are also interested in systematic electronic checks of documents - instead of the more standard visual checks - of EU citizens leaving and entering the passport-free Schengen zone.
The checks would link up national police databases, the Schengen Information System (an EU-wide criminal database), and Interpol resources.
Kerchove noted that some EU member states, including France, Germany, and the UK, are also drawing up legislation to confiscate returning fighters’ passports.