A French journalist’s ISIS captives cared so little about religion they did not even have a Quran, Didier Françoiswho spent over 10 months as the group’s prisoner in Syriatold CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.
“There was never really discussion about texts or — it was not a religious discussion. It was a political discussion.”
“It was more hammering what they were believing than teaching us about the Quran. Because it has nothing to do with the Quran.”
“They didn’t even have the Quran; they didn’t want even to give us a Quran.”
François was released in April last year, but has only rarely spoken about his ordeal. He is one of the rare ISIS hostages who was freed.
Among those still held by ISIS is an American woman, U.S. President Barack Obama acknowledged this weekend in an interview with NBC News.
François told Amanpour that he had met her twice. He was reluctant to get into details, lest anything jeopardize her safety.
In general, he said, women “had a bit more freedom of movement,” but being an ISIS hostage is “frightening enough,” and “being a woman doesn’t make it easier.”
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Trying to survive between factions
As a former captive, François has incredible perspective on the inner workings of an opaque and new organization.
“The Iraqi and the Syrian people who join ISIS are much more traditional conservative kind of guys from the tribes.”
“And sometimes it’s not easy for them to fit with the jihadis coming from other countries, because they don’t share the same ideas, they don’t share the same behaviors, they don’t have the same codes. And sometimes it’s really tense between them.”
Unlike al Qaeda, from which ISIS was cleft, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “is always trying to root his organization in the local conflict.”
“He always tries to push the Sunni tribes, the Bedouins, to fight against the Shiite, or the Yazidi, or the Christians. And they trying to play communities one against the others. That’s how he survives. That’s how he recruits.”
“He is using, of course, those young guys coming from Europe or coming from all over the place. But it’s only one part of his organization. The strongest parts of his organization are the tribes, the local Sunni tribes.”
Survival, he said, was a matter of trying to exist “in between those.”
