With delicate features and an unkempt beard, Maxime Hauchard, 22, helped to carry out executions in the arid Syrian landscape.He was once, according to his uncle, a calm and happy little boy. "He was never even naughty as a child," Pascal Hauchard said.But this week, Maxime became the latest name in the roll-call of Western recruits fighting alongside Islamic State.He had already given a Skype interview to French television, describing life in Syria and his desire to become a martyr.It's an odd kind of celebrity for a French boy from rural Normandy who, according to local reports, converted to Islam at the age of 17.But converts appear to make up a striking number of the French citizens attracted to the militants' cause, and generate a huge amount of interest back home, as shown by the case of the British militant nicknamed "Jihadi John".The second Frenchman has been named by prosecutors as Mickael Dos Santos, 22, from a small town just south-east of Paris.Propaganda value"They do it on purpose, of course they do," says Professor Jean-Pierre Filiu, from the School of International Affairs at Sciences-Po."Western recruits have no military value [to militant groups] at the moment; they have no training or expertise. Their value is in propaganda and recruitment. Militant leaders want to use European Muslims as hostages for their own propaganda, to generate fear of a fifth column back home. And it's working."Responding to the latest video, President Francois Hollande said that more must be done to warn French families of the dangers of militant recruitment campaigns, which he said could touch people from every background, including converts.Converts do appear to make up a substantial portion of those attracted to IS from France.One recent survey by the French Institute, CPDSI, found that 90% of those who adopted radical Islamic beliefs had French grandparents, and that 80% came from atheist families.Over half of all phone calls to a government helpline, set up to combat jihadist recruitment, concerned teenagers without any Muslim or Arab background. Those figures may not be representative of all French recruits in Syria, but they give some context to stories like Hauchard's.Attraction of the cultPierre N'Gahane, who is a member of a government de-radicalisation team working on the issue, says the profiles of those attracted to IS ideology are hugely varied."You have the young girl who got high grades at school, and went to dance lessons, who in the course of a single day rejected her friends, and changed her dress and diet," he explained."Or the serial delinquent, always in trouble with the law, who dropped out of the army. Or the young student who was already isolated, and tips into radicalism during one moment of fragility."Prof Filiu believes that the reason these young people have such hugely diverse profiles is partly a reflection of the tactics used by IS."Any recruits that arrive are brutalised in a kind of initiation ceremony," he told the BBC, "and then they are forced to recruit four or five of their buddies through Facebook. That's why you have profiles that are so unpredictable, and why converts bring in more converts."But, he says, it's also precisely because most of them don't come from a Muslim religious culture and aren't looking for religion at all.Instead they are isolated teenagers, "fast-tracked" into an extreme ideology, "a cult", whose appeal is very different to the piety and purity promised by organised religion, Mr Filiu adds."If you look at the images sent home," he told me, " it's all pizza and guns and sunsets over the Euphrates. It's an offer to join 'the winners'. Anybody who wants to become famous knows that if he goes and kills a hostage, he'll become a star, and be splashed across the front page of the newspaper back home."'Victim narrative'Pierre N'Gahane agrees. "Converts to radical Islam are very different to those converting to Islam," he says."They don't go through the mosque. They're fragile people who are drawn to a sectarian version of Islam, and really any other kind of sect would have done just as well. The attraction is a narrative that gives them an identity as victims of Western society, and as somehow special and chosen by God."That has clear implications for how the government here should be tackling the problem.Bakudaily.Az