PARIS: A horrified France was grappling with a new reality on Thursday in which hundreds of its citizens are openly joining jihadist groups and directly calling for attacks on their homeland.

A new video from the Islamic State (IS) group released on social websites on Wednesday showed three Kalashnikov-wielding Frenchmen burning their passports and calling on people to join them or stage attacks in France.

The new video explicitly calls for retaliation against France for launching air strikes against the IS, which has seized large parts of Syria and Iraq.

It follows the appearance of two other French militants — identified as 22-year-olds Maxime Hauchard and Mickael Dos Santos — in a brutal IS execution video released at the weekend.

Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian announced on Wednesday that France would step up its campaign against the militants, sending six Mirage fighter jets to Jordan in December.

France currently has nine Rafale jets based in the Gulf region as part of a US-led international campaign to provide air support to Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting the group.

But France is increasingly looking inwards as it reels from the news that over 1,000 people from a wide range of backgrounds have left to join the militants in Iraq and Syria, with 375 already there.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Wednesday that “close to 50” French citizens or residents of France have been killed in the conflict zone.

“So we know the dangers and, sadly, we are not surprised to learn that French citizens or residents of France are found at the heart of these cells and taking part in this barbarity,” said Valls.

French authorities say the other French militant in the video, Dos Santos, is of Portuguese origin but born in the French riverside town of Champigny-sur-Marne.

He was part of a network of radical young men in his neighborhood and is believed to have left for Syria in the autumn of 2013, according to a government source.

United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon said Wednesday that violent extremism had to be tackled “at the grassroots level.”

“We must continue to think more deeply into the fundamental conditions that allow extremism to thrive. Looking at these challenges solely through a military lens has shown its limits,” he told a special Security Council meeting on counter-terrorism. France is far from alone in dealing with the problem.