As multiple alarming tales of teenagers fleeing their countries to join the Islamic State have been making the rounds, an entire French family of 11, including a grandmother, is now believed to have escaped their French scenic coast city of Nice to join the Islamic State fighters in Syria, French government officials said Wednesday.
After a 27-year-old woman and her family converted to Islam, they are believed to have left the country in September, eventually making their way through Turkey to enter Syria, according to Agence France-Presse who cited French newspaper, Nice-Matin.
The family was described as comprising of a grandmother, her three children and their spouses, plus four grandchildren, including a 6-month old, according to New York Post.
"I was not going to go, but before Allah I could not stand back," the unidentified woman reportedly told a friend.
The family's disappearance was noticed when the father of one of the spouses became suspicious after his daughter posted photos on Twitter suggesting her location to be somewhere in Turkey, Le Figaro reported. He immediately found out that his daughter, and her two sons, aged 6 and 4, had vanished since last month and reported them as missing.
One of the son's teachers allegedly confirmed that the mother had informed the school about taking a week off due to a death in the family, but never returned.
Meanwhile, the family's neighborhood on the French Rivera was reported to be a city that is home to radical Islamist elements and a point of departure for those joining the Syrian conflict, the Associated Press reported.
France, home to a population of 66 million, has a Muslim community of 4.7 million (as of 2010), largely of North African descent, who arrived from the 1950s onward in the wake of France's de-colonization and the 1970s regroupement familial policy, which welcomed the families of migrant workers from ex-colonies.
In recent years, "France has witnessed a growing threat of terrorism as hundreds of young French Muslims are believed to have flocked abroad to fight for jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq, with the potential to return home as radicalized members of society," IBT reported. As many as 1,500 British Muslims may have travelled to the Middle East to fight for ISIS, putting the figure at more than twice the number that fight for the British armed forces, a British MP claimed last week.
