They are between 14 and 17 years old and are “fanatics” of the Islamic State (IS) organisation. They binge-watch the most violent videos, join online discussion groups that feed their obsession and develop plans of attack. They often have only a very superficial knowledge of Islam and do not attend mosques. They are lonely teenagers, who spend most of their time on the Internet or playing war video games, locked in a deadly digital and ideological bubble.
The terrorist threat has been characterised, over the past two years, by a worrying fact: the spectacular rejuvenation of the perpetrators of attack plans. Since 2023, twenty-three minors – the youngest was 14 years old – have been charged with plans of violent action inspired by jihadism, according to figures from the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office. While teenagers accounted for only 1% of the accusations for “terrorist criminal association” in 2022, their proportion soared to 10% in 2023 and 21% during the first seven months of 2024.
“The attraction to jihadist ideology has significantly decreased due to the defeat of ISIS in 2017-2018., noted In an interview with WorldIn December 2023, Nicolas Lerner, head of the Directorate General for Internal Security (DGSI) between 2018 and January 2024But today propaganda is once again seducing a new generation of teenagers who, for various reasons – a search for identity, the echo of a discourse of victimization, a glorification of violent impulses that they might otherwise feed – are once again showing sensitivity to this ideology.
Sociologist Elyamine Settoul, director of the defense and society area of the Institute of Strategic Research of the Military School and author of Thinking about jihadist radicalization (PUF, 2022), identifies five main axes that allow us to understand the jihadization of this generation: the “devotion” religious, whom he considers a minority, I“emotion” (among the lost teenagers for whom “Radical adherence turns self-hatred into hatred of others”), there “politicization” (which feeds on the fate of Muslims in the world), the “handling” sectarian and, finally, the “impulsion”murderer or suicide.
These categories are not watertight and often coexist in the same individual. Behind this “mosaic” profiles, the researcher thus isolates several traits Common to this new “generation jihad”: “passionate about video games”often failing academically and socially, is marked by “identity discomfort” which translates into a “withdrawal into oneself”. a feeling of“social uselessness”explains, which leads certain young people to seek “ephemeral glory” promised by jihadist propaganda.
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