For 3 years, I followed a family searching for a grandchild they've never met

By Myriam François, director, Finding Alaa

I met Azdyne Amimour in 2019 through a colleague who was researching the repatriation of minors from Syria to France. 

I recognized the name Amimour immediately through its association with Samy Amimour, one of the extremists responsible for the ISIS attacks in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015. He was one of three gunmen at the Bataclan concert hall, where at least 89 people were killed and dozens more were injured. The coordinated attacks on multiple sites across Paris were France's deadliest since the Second World War and are a source of ongoing national trauma.

Azdyne is Samy's father. He had largely been in hiding since the attacks.

A lost son, a missing granddaughter  

Samy left France for Syria in 2013 and cut contact with his family in the months prior to the 2015 attack. The last news they'd had from Samy's then-wife was that she was pregnant and the baby was due weeks after the Paris attacks. Then nothing.

When I first met Azdyne, he believed his then four-year-old granddaughter, Alaa, was somewhere in northern Syria, but he didn't even know if she was alive. After all, the civil war in Syria has led to the death of over 300,000 civilians, including many children. 

The Amimours had no birth certificate, no official documents proving a family link and no proof that she existed. As far as they knew, she might not even have been born.

Over the course of three years, which included the global pandemic, I followed the Amimours as they searched for their missing grandchild. Alongside this quest — which often felt like trying to find a needle in a haystack — I watched Azdyne try and rebuild his life and repair, as best he could, the harm Samy had caused. 

Two men lost a child in the attacks — one a victim, one a gunman

Georges Salines also lost a child on Nov. 13. His daughter was killed at the Bataclan concert hall. 

In 2020, he and Azdyne published We Still Have Words, a book about their shared experience losing a child, albeit from opposite sides of an event they were both still trying to understand.

The two men have sought to challenge the binaries that emerged in France after November 2015. Together with Retissons du lien, a group of relatives of the perpetrators and victims, they're trying to show society that another way is possible: one of reconciliation. 

I will forever remember what Sandrine, a group member who survived one of the 2016 bombings in Brussels, told me: "It was hate that destroyed me. And I felt very quickly that I could never rebuild myself through hate."

This film was inspired by Azdyne and Georges's courage and their determination to challenge the societal schism created by the 2015 attacks and the political response to them. 

Still searching for Alaa 

In late 2022, the Amimours found out through the media that Alaa and her mother had been repatriated to France. But as of December, Azdyne still doesn't know where exactly Alaa is or if he'll be allowed to see her. 

Azdyne's family is not alone in searching for a child in the embers of ISIS. There are hundreds of other families in France and in other countries, desperately looking for the young children of current or former members of ISIS, often with little to no help from the authorities. 

I hope Finding Alaa honours these families, as well the resilience of all victims of ISIS in Syria and in France — those who died on Nov. 13 and their loved ones, as well as those who feel their children and grandchildren have been ripped from them, but whose suffering has largely been in silence. This is the story of the other victims of ISIS — those we haven't yet been able to hear. 

Finding Alaa was co-commissioned by CBC and BBC.