Watch this — what would draw these women to this hellhole entirely cloaked in body bags? Religious fervor.

These French women stand with the beheaders of the French tourist in Algeria. Why? Because nationality is irrelevant.

“French Report: Syrian Woman Secretly Films Life in Raqqa under ISIS,” International Business Times, September 24, 2014

An undercover video report in Syria’s northern city of Raqqa, the unofficial capital of Islamic State (previously known as Isis), has shed a light on French women choosing to abandon their previous Western life to join jihad in the Middle East.

French citizens have joined the Islamist militias in Iraq and Syria in droves in recent months.

Last week, French police arrested and placed into custody six people in Lyon, including two minors, on suspicion of luring young women for the jihad in the Middle East.

France 2 report, filmed by a Syrian woman who agreed to carry a hidden camera to film daily life in the caliphate’s headquarters, features niqab-wearing women with AK-47, omnipresent armed men and the usual harassment from Isis religious police, the Hisbah, on matters of women’s decency.

It also shows black-clad women sitting at an underground Internet cafe’ in the heart of Raqqa, all conversing in perfect French in front of each computer. All of them are talking to relatives that they have left in France.

“I’m not going back, mom. I’m telling you bluntly,” says one. “You have to get it through your head that I’m not returning. I did not take the risk by coming here to go back to France. I won’t go back to France.”

“There is nothing to gain from weeping or being afraid. All you see on in TV is false. I swear, it is false. They exaggerate everything on TV.”

As US-led airstrikes hit Isis targets in Raqqa and other Islamists’ controlled areas in northern and eastern Syria, the international attention is focusing on the militants recruitment drive of women and girls to the jihadists’ cause.

Earlier in September, news came out of a 20-year-old former radiography student from Glasgow, Aqsa Mahmood, who travelled to Syria to marry an Islamic State jihadist. Through her Twitter account, she encouraged Muslims to carry out attacks in the west.

“Follow the examples of your brothers from Woolwich, Texas and Boston,” she tweeted. “‘If you cannot make it to the battlefield, then bring the battlefield to yourself.”

France 2, which commissioned the report in February and April this year, estimate that there are roughly 150 French women in Syria.