DECLINE AND FALL: French see their children add to ISIS ranks in Syria.

Valérie Aubry-Dumont got the news in a WhatsApp message from deep inside Islamic State territory. “Mom, you’re going to be a grandmother,” wrote her teenage daughter, Cléa.

When Aubry-Dumont last saw her daughter, Cléa was a 16-year-old girl attending Catholic school in a Paris suburb. After a breakup, Cléa met a young man online and within months the couple fled France to live in a stretch of northern Syria ruled by Islamic State.

“I wish Cléa never had children,” Aubry-Dumont, a child-care worker, says now that her grandson has been born. Her daughter talks some days of returning to France, Aubry-Dumont said, but is afraid of losing her baby if she tries to leave. “She is trapped.”

She chose poorly.