SEVRAN, France — The last will and testament of Quentin Roy, a good-looking 23-year-old from the Paris suburb of Sevran, was written in neat blue biro on a piece of paper torn from a notebook. He gave instructions for his Samsung tablet to be given to fellow fighters, and listed mobile phone numbers for “Maman” and “Papa” so that his parents could be informed of his death via Whatsapp.

Véronique Roy, who sells advertising for health magazines, received a photograph of her son’s will on January 14. The Islamic State member who sent it added that Quentin had blown himself up in Iraq, “martyred on the soil of the caliphate.”

Sevran, an unloved town a 20-minute train ride from Gare du Nord, has seen 15 of its young men depart for Iraq or Syria since 2014. Nine are now believed dead, according to Véronique and Thierry Roy, who are in touch with families in the same situation.

When Quentin left Sevran in September 2014, his parents recalled that many young men from the local housing estates had sounded impressed.

“So he’s gone to look for a life,” was a common refrain. “Respect, man. He’s got balls.”

Sevran lies in the banlieues, the French word for “suburb” that has come to serve as shorthand for the poverty, crime and failed integration that have blighted the edges of French cities for decades.

Cities minister Patrick Kanner estimates there are “a hundred” French neighborhoods that bear a resemblance to Molenbeek, the Brussels district now globally infamous as a jihadist breeding ground. Sevran is high on the list.

“What is Molenbeek? It is a concentration of enormous poverty and unemployment,” Kanner told Europe 1 radio. “It’s a system where public services have practically disappeared, it’s a system where politicians have thrown in the towel.”

The topic is especially sensitive since men from both Molenbeek and the Parisian banlieues coordinated attacks that killed 130 people in Paris last November.

French commentators have warned against assuming that if a neighborhood is poor, crime-ridden and full of immigrants, it must also be a hotbed of radical Islam.

The last thing Sevran’s residents want is for “jihad” to top the list of things for which their town is already notorious — crime, drugs, poverty.

But it may be too late. In an open letter, Véronique and Thierry Roy accused Sevran’s mayor of failing to shut down a jihadist recruitment network.

“We are outraged by your inaction,” they wrote. “Radicalization is all the rage. One recruiter has been arrested, but there are others still hard at work.”

‘The government has no idea’

In the late 19th century, Sevran was a leafy village at the heart of France’s explosives industry, and home to the national gunpowder factory. To Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite before his name took on more peaceful connotations, it was the perfect place to experiment.

Today, Mayor of Sevran Stéphane Gatignon says the banlieues themselves “risk exploding.” The riots that engulfed suburbs nationwide in 2005 could easily repeat themselves, he warned on the 10th anniversary of the uprising.

While France’s economy is officially growing again, there is little to show for it here. The gunpowder factory closed in the 1970s, followed by two other major factories in the 1990s. The old industrial quarter is a ghost town.

Gatignon is a lean man of 46, and an unusual mayor. He went on hunger strike in 2012 to demand more state funding for hard-up towns, and walked away with a budget increase.

Now he looks exhausted. He has been hounded by the media over the Roy family’s letter, and regularly refers to being “at war.” Sevran has indeed paid the price for radicalization in more ways than one: A member of Gatignon’s town hall staff was killed in the carnage at the Bataclan concert venue in November.

Gatignon says he has done everything he can to stop jihadist recruiters from operating in Sevran, but that there are limits to what a mayor can do. He lays the blame firmly on the state.

“The government has no idea what is happening on the ground,” he says, wearily rubbing his eyes. “There is a total disconnect between what happens in offices in Paris and what happens in reality.”

Many of the young Sevranais who left to wage jihad had frequented an informal prayer hall known locally as the “Daesh mosque.” Gatignon repeatedly asked the state to shut it down — he did not have the authority to do so himself — but says he was ignored. It was finally closed for good in March.

The mayor has a raft of other problems to deal with. Sevran’s public housing is overcrowded and school funding is scarce. In 2011, violence between drug gangs got so bad that Gatignon suggested U.N. peacekeepers should be brought in. Forty percent of young adults are officially unemployed, a rate that surpasses Molenbeek’s.

The government recently placed Sevran on a list of 12 “priority neighborhoods” with particularly dire social problems, and ordered officials to be brought in from Paris in April.

‘Wanted to stay open-minded’

Sevran is home to more than 70 nationalities. “It’s not like the Muslim community dominates everything,” says Gatignon.

The 15 young men who left Sevran to join the Islamic State came from a variety of family backgrounds: Algerian, Moroccan, Mauritanian, Haitian. Some came from Muslim families; several, including Quentin Roy, were converts. Some came from the cités, the post-war housing blocks synonymous with drugs and gang violence. Quentin, privately educated, did not.

His parents live in a neat detached house. Thierry, a hippyish Haitian, works as a medical salesman. Their remaining son is a software engineer.

Quentin was raised a Catholic. He converted in 2013 and made no attempt to hide it from his parents, who tried to be supportive.

“We wanted to stay open-minded with him, to have a conversation about it,” Thierry says over dinner at their home, which is full of pictures of both of their sons.

In the space of a few months, Quentin’s views became increasingly extreme. He quit his job at a sports store when they wouldn’t let him schedule his shifts around prayer. He refused to join in family celebrations or attend his grandmother’s funeral because it was held in a church.

A month later, he left for Frankfurt. Quentin told his parents he was picking up a new car for his work as an Uber driver. He never came back.

From the battlefield, Quentin sent sporadic messages defending the holy fight. The manager of Sevran’s Grand Mosque helped Véronique write a reply, using quotations from the Koran to tell her son why he was wrong to think he should fight in Syria.

An energetic woman, she says she has been let down by the authorities. She and Thierry feel lonely and helpless. They say Gatignon has tried to shift the blame for things he should have fixed himself, doing little, for instance, to publicize a helpline for parents worried that their kids have been radicalized.

The reason, she says, is political. “It’s a way of not sticking the town with the ‘radicalization’ label when we already have a drug problem.”

The Daesh mosque

Véronique and Thierry Roy are the only Sevran parents to have gone public about their son’s death as a jihadist. Most parents don’t speak out, Véronique says, “because they don’t want to get involved with the authorities and they don’t want to be judged by the community.”

The couple receives regular messages from other Sevran families who have lost their children to ISIL. They want to raise the alarm but avoid the public scrutiny the Roys have dealt with since their open letter to the mayor.

The young men who left Sevran departed between 2014 and the end of 2015, when the Islamic State appeared to be making massive inroads in its mission to create a caliphate straddling Syria and Iraq. All were younger than 25, and many had played soccer together.

Instead of worshiping at the mainstream Grand Mosque of Sevran, several of the boys began frequenting the informal prayer hall known as the Daesh mosque. This was not, in fact, a mosque: It was a former shop rented out as a private prayer space by Muslims who felt that the town’s official mosque did not preach a strict enough version of Islam.

Among the young men who worshipped there is a Sorbonne history graduate called Ilyes. He has been in detention since November for “criminal association in relation to terrorist activity,” a charge he denies. He is the one who accompanied Quentin Roy to the airport when he set off for jihad.

Achraf Ben Brahim, a law student at Nanterre University who has known both Quentin and Ilyes since childhood, describes Ilyes as “someone who joked with everyone and smiled 24/7.” The pair shared a spirit of intellectual curiosity and would often linger after soccer matches, “imagining a better world.” Ilyes had a clean criminal record, and had previously held a job as a middle school supervisor.

The last time Ben Brahim saw Ilyes, in September 2015, he worried that his friend’s opinions had become increasingly extreme. The next thing he knew, he was phoning his old friend in prison.

‘They work in the shadows’

Members of Sevran’s mainstream Grand Mosque were the ones to first alert officials to radical preaching at the Daesh mosque two years ago.

Merzak El-Bekkay, an imposing man who manages the Grand Mosque’s administration and finances, says that beyond warning the authorities, there was little he could do to stop the extremist preaching at the informal prayer hall across town.

“We can’t stop people meeting in a private setting,” he says. “Our mission is to have a dialogue — and, when we hear people preaching hate and violence, to come up with counter-arguments.”

The shopfront of the Daesh mosque has now been bricked up, but no one believes this puts a definitive end to radical preaching in Sevran.

“They work in the shadows,” El-Bekkay says of the preachers who frequented the makeshift mosque. “Today they’re in Sevran, tomorrow it might be Aubervilliers or somewhere else.”

Suburbs on the defensive

There is, experts are at pains to say, no such thing as a French jihadist “profile.” Some are radicalized in prison, others self-radicalize on the Internet. Some grew up in the banlieues, including Bataclan attackers Omar Ismail Mostefai and Samy Amimour. Many French citizens heading to Iraq and Syria have been women. Some, like Quentin, played the piano.

The renewed media attention has banlieue mayors like Sevran’s on the defensive. Trappes, on the southern fringe of Paris, and Lunel in southern France have also seen a trickle of young men leave to fight in Syria.

Authorities announced they had foiled another attack on France last month when police raided an apartment in Argenteuil, a banlieue in northwestern Paris, and found assault rifles, handguns and TATP, the homemade explosive most often used by the Islamic State. Mayor Georges Mothron angrily denied that he presides over a “French Molenbeek.”

‘Lifelong humiliation’

In a country built on liberté, egalité and fraternité, people from places like Sevran often talk of changing their name to something “more French” to get a job interview, or using a fake address on their CVs.

For Ben Brahim, it does not come as a surprise that alienated French Muslims from the banlieues have headed to Syria. He points to rising Islamophobia after the Paris attacks.

“In a social crisis doubled by contempt for Muslims, how can you get outraged by the idea that the youth of this country might be won over by the arguments of ISIL?” he says.

“Because ultimately, what future does a kid from the banlieues have in France? Getting into debt to open a kebab shop? Or finishing up as an Uber driver?”

Thierry and Véronique Roy, meanwhile, are embroiled in a legal fight to stop plans to build a large mosque on their street. Then there is their ongoing public battle with the mayor — and a struggle to pick up the pieces at home.

“They stole my son,” Véronique says.

Claire Sergent is a freelance journalist working for Europe 1 and other media in France, previously based at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London. Katy Lee is a journalist with Agence France-Presse in Paris, formerly reporting from London and Hong Kong.