Study Reveals Family Backgrounds of Belgian-Moroccan Jihadists Who Left for Syria

How and in what family environment were these Belgian terrorists of Moroccan origin who went to Syria raised, lived and grew up? This is the question answered by Aicha Bacha in her book titled "Le Djihad en héritage sur le territoire belge", which is being published by L’Harmattan. An investigation at the heart of 32 families where she met and exchanged with the mothers of the jihadists who went to Syria, who describe children "like the others", "little angels", writes the newspaper La Dernière heure.

Out of the 32 families studied, at least 7 had a "rather good" situation, which led the researcher to focus her research on the family unit. The 32 mothers describe "family shipwrecks", families torn apart by divorces (eight cases) and absent fathers who "completely lost interest in the education of their children". "When the husbands left the mothers, they did not even bother to ask about the children. And when they learned of the radicalization of the latter, they blamed the mothers, pointed to the "imperfect" education they had given them, and left them alone to assume the fact of having failed in their (maternal) role," writes Aicha Bacha.

Based on the accounts of 28 mothers, the researcher established that the jihadists who went to Syria had witnessed domestic violence by their father against their mother in their childhood. "We note that they reproduced what they had seen as children, at home, at school, in the street, in Syria," she explains, also noting "8 cases of paternal violence towards children who became terrorists." For Aicha Bacha, this partly explains the violent radicalization of these young people. "When children are witnesses or victims, they learn to normalize the use of violence, which becomes for them an acceptable way of managing conflicts. This is the social learning of violence. Children who have suffered violence reproduce violence," she specifies.

Most of these families are originally from northern Morocco, a region where the average crime rate is relatively high, the academic also analyzes, specifying that about 75% of the 422 jihadists who went to Syria had problems with the law before their departure. 142 would have died there, about 150 would still be in the Middle East and at least 130 would have returned, of whom a dozen died in the attacks in Paris and Brussels. Aicha Bacha points out that the children of the same family, exposed to the same scenes of violence, did not all go to Syria, nor did they all become jihadists and terrorists.