Daech, the children of suspicion

They are often under five years old, but a prosecutor has described them as “ticking time bombs.” Since then, they have frightened public opinion so much that the government prefers not to repatriate all of them, despite the disastrous conditions in which they are growing up, among the ruins of a terrorist caliphate where their parents had taken them.

This film follows, over the course of a year, the story of the French children of ISIS—and the way France deals with them, case by case. Three hundred of them remain held in camps in Syria or prisons in Iraq. Around a hundred others have already been repatriated to France since 2016. Sophie Parmentier and Hélène Lam Trong followed their intersecting destinies for more than a year.

We meet French jihadist Mélina Boughedir in a Baghdad prison after her sentencing to 20 years in June 2018: she refuses to be separated from her two-year-old daughter. When we meet them, Hakim and Hicham, aged 3 and 6, have spent half their lives under the Islamic State. They are placed with foster families in France. Their mother, Gladys, prosecuted for terrorism, hopes to regain custody. Lydie and Patrice Maninchedda are grandparents left distraught since their only daughter departed for Raqqa in 2014, where she gave birth to four children under ISIS. As for Suzanne and Marc, they are fighting to have their four grandchildren repatriated; the children are held with their mother in the Roj camp in Syria, while their father has been sentenced to death in Iraq.

This documentary is illuminated by the unprecedented testimonies of judges, educators, and psychologists who care for these children of jihadists—children who so deeply unsettle public opinion.