Three French women including a niece of notorious jihadist propagandists went on trial in Paris on Monday, accused of travelling to the Middle East to join the Islamic State group and taking their eight children with them.
One of the women is Jennyfer Clain, 34, a niece of Jean-Michel and Fabien Clain, who claimed responsibility on behalf of IS for the attacks on November 13, 2015, when 130 people were killed at the Bataclan concert hall and elsewhere in Paris in shootings that traumatised France.
The Clain brothers are presumed dead. In 2022, they were sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment without parole.
The two other women on trial are Jennyfer Clain’s sister-in-law, Mayalen Duhart, 42, and 67-year-old Christine Allain, the women’s mother-in-law. They face up to 30 years in prison if convicted.
The defendants are being tried by a special criminal court in Paris that is sitting without a jury, a standard practice in French terrorism cases.
The women had travelled to Raqqa, the Islamic State group’s onetime capital, with their children in 2014.
“I’m not here to deny the charges against me. I joined this terrorist group,” Jennyfer Clain, wearing jeans and a grey jacket, said in court.
“I’m guilty. I regret it so much, but I can’t go back,” she said.
Clain ended up in Raqqa after marrying Kevin Gonot, a friend of the Clain brothers.
– ‘Could not live without him’ –
Duhart is the only one of the three who is appearing in court as a free woman, saying she is now working at a bakery.
She said she had converted to fundamentalist Islam for her partner, Thomas Collange, who is Gonot’s half-brother.
“Very quickly, he told me I had to convert,” Duhart told the court. “I couldn’t live without him.”
The two women’s mother-in-law was a former special education teacher who was introduced to radical Islamic beliefs by Collange, her eldest son.
After the 2017 battle for Raqqa, which marked the IS group’s defeat, the three women spent two years with its retreating forces before trying to enter Turkey.
Turkish authorities detained the three women in 2019 as they attempted to enter from Syria with nine children aged between 3 and 13.
Eight of the children had been born in France.
The women were then expelled to France, where they were charged with criminal association with a terrorist enterprise.
The two women’s husbands, Gonot and Collange, were arrested during the retreat. The former was sentenced to death in Iraq in 2019 but his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
Clain and Duhart are also being prosecuted for failing to fulfil their parental obligations, notably for voluntarily taking their children “to a war zone to join a terrorist group”, the indictment said, exposing them to “significant risk of physical and psychological harm”.
– ‘Now at peace’ –
In their decision to refer the three women to a criminal court, the investigating judges noted that they “remained for a long period of time” within jihadist groups.
“It was with full knowledge of the facts” that Allain and her two daughters-in-law chose to join the Islamic State group in Syria after the caliphate was established, according to the investigating magistrates’ indictment seen by AFP.
Allain’s lawyer said she had worked hard to turn her life around.
“Christine Allain is now at peace,” Edouard Delattre told AFP. “She has met with many professionals while in detention to consider social reintegration.”
“She still considers herself a Muslim, but she has only known one interpretation of Islam, the wrong one,” Delattre said, adding that “She hates the person she had become.”
The trial is scheduled to last until September 26.
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