International [ISIS Repatriation] Yazidis plead with Canada not to repatriate ISIS members

They just lived out a literal snuff-movie participation vacation. No biggie. Now these entitled sociopaths "just want to come home" - "meh" consciences and all.
 
Germany is in the process of charging a woman named Jennifer W.

BERLIN — While devoted followers of the Islamic State, a man and woman bought a 5-year-old Yazidi girl in Iraq to use as a slave, then let her die of thirst in the scorching heat, the German authorities contend. The trial of the woman began on Tuesday — one of the highest-profile cases against a female member of the terrorist group.
merlin_153258195_cfb40a32-8447-4664-b29e-5009b1850267-superJumbo.jpg

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/world/europe/germany-isis-trial.html

She will probably help make Germany Great Again...
 
Son of Jamin said:
Germany is in the process of charging a woman named Jennifer W.

BERLIN — While devoted followers of the Islamic State, a man and woman bought a 5-year-old Yazidi girl in Iraq to use as a slave, then let her die of thirst in the scorching heat, the German authorities contend. The trial of the woman began on Tuesday — one of the highest-profile cases against a female member of the terrorist group.
merlin_153258195_cfb40a32-8447-4664-b29e-5009b1850267-superJumbo.jpg

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/world/europe/germany-isis-trial.html

She will probably help make Germany Great Again...
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It must have taken remarkable self control for the agent she was shooting her mouth of to about the enslavement,abuse and murder of a 5 year old not to drag her out by the side of the road and kick her to death .
 
Their parents joined ISIS. They were raised in the caliphate. Can they come home?
By Michael Birnbaum | February 17

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Fatiha, in her living room outside Antwerp, Belgium, has been pushing the government to repatriate her grandchildren, daughter and daughter-in-law. ​

RANST, Belgium — The children’s voices crackled through the phone and into Fatiha’s gray-walled living room.

“When are we going to Grandma’s?” one implored in the background, and then into the phone: “Are you coming to get us?”

In the hallway, six coat hooks were fixed in a row at child’s height. A backpack hung on each one. Up a steep stairway, sheets with characters from Pixar’s “Cars” were carefully tucked into bunk beds, awaiting the children’s return.

But Fatiha, a Belgian whose grandparents emigrated from Morocco, didn’t know when her six grandchildren — who range in age from 10 months to 7 years — would be back. They are among the hundreds of children born to European citizens who went to fight for the Islamic State. Now that the group’s self-declared caliphate has collapsed, and the planned U.S. withdrawal from Syria has compounded regional instability, grandparents across Europe are pushing to save children who in some cases they’ve seen only in photos, looking up at them from the dusty desert floor.

“We’re waiting for them; everything is ready for them,” Fatiha, 46, said in an interview at her home outside Antwerp, in a bucolic village where backyards give way to hayfields. The children’s fathers are dead, and their mothers — Fatiha’s daughter and daughter-in-law — would face prison sentences if they return to Belgium. So Fatiha has prepared to care for the children herself. To protect her grandchildren, she spoke on the condition that her last name not be published.

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Fatiha has backpacks and bags of gifts waiting for her grandchildren.​


For Belgium, France and other countries that saw some of their nationals gravitate toward Islamic State territory as it expanded across Syria and Iraq, the plight of children who have claims to citizenship has ignited questions that would test the most Solomonic of judges.

Governments are grappling with how much responsibility they bear for the safety of these small citizens, most of them younger than 6, in a region where fresh conflict could erupt. Courts are weighing whether the rights of the children extend to returning with their Islamic State parents. And a bitter public debate is underway about whether grandparents whose own children ran away to the Islamic State can be trusted to raise a new generation differently.

The Kurdish authorities who control the territory in northeast Syria where many of these families ended up estimate they have more than 1,300 children in their refugee and prison camps. Russia repatriated 27 children on Feb. 10. France is considering bringing back more than 100 fighters — who would face trial — and their families.

With the Islamic State losing control of its final pockets of territory, President Trump last weekend urged European allies to take back and prosecute their citizens who went to fight with the Islamic State. “The alternative is not a good one in that we will be forced to release them,” he tweeted. “The U.S. does not want to watch as these ISIS fighters permeate Europe, which is where they are expected to go.”

But until now, most governments have calculated that the political downside of retrieving fighters who may pose security risks outweighs any need to bring back their children.

In Fatiha’s case, a judge ruled that Belgium must repatriate her six grandchildren, along with her daughter and her daughter-in-law — Belgian citizens who joined the Islamic State and now want to come back. The two women were convicted in absentia of joining a terrorist organization and would each face a five-year prison sentence upon their arrival on Belgian soil. But the judge ruled that bringing the children home and leaving their mothers in Syria would violate the children’s human rights.

The Dec. 26 ruling has spurred a furious response from Belgian leaders, and the government planned to appeal in court this week. Authorities expect whatever precedent is set to affect decisions about other Islamic State families. At least 22 Belgian children are in Syrian camps, and more than 160 are thought to be in the conflict zone.

The most vociferous objections relate to the return of the parents.

“We won’t punish young children for their parents’ misdeeds. They have not chosen the Islamic State. That is why we want to make efforts to bring them back to our country,” Belgium’s migration secretary, Maggie De Block, said in a statement last month. “For the parents, the situation is different. They themselves have deliberately chosen to turn their backs on our country and even to fight against it. Repeatedly.

“Solidarity has its limits,” she said. “The freedom you enjoy in our country to make your own decisions also means you bear responsibility for the consequences.”

Last Sunday, in response to Trump’s tweets, Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens said his government was in contact with Britain, France and the Netherlands to explore the security consequences of bringing back former fighters.

But spokesmen for De Block and Belgium’s prime minister all declined to comment for this report. They would not confirm whether the government was paying the judge’s prescribed penalty of 5,000 euros per child per day if they weren’t returned by Feb. 4.

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Fatiha bought costumes and fairy wings for her granddaughters in anticipation of their return.​


Even for the children, Belgian sympathy goes only so far. Many people are anxious. Belgium contributed the largest number of Islamic State fighters to Syria per capita of any European Union nation, and the country remains scarred by the attacks of 2016, when Belgian citizens with Islamic State connections targeted Brussels with deadly bombings. Discussions on talk shows and in editorial pages have stoked fear about what the children may have learned from their parents or from Islamic State training camps, which targeted children as young as 6 for indoctrination — although little evidence exists that any of the Belgians were exposed.

Belgium needs “to protect both these children as well as our children, and to protect the parents of our children,” said Nadia Sminate, a lawmaker in the regional parliament for the Dutch-speaking north of Belgium who has been a vocal critic of plans to bring back the children. “These children have been raised with different values and norms than our children. We don’t have to be silly about that. They’ve seen the cruelest things in the world.”

When Fatiha needs to cheer herself up, she plays a video her daughter sent last summer of her grandchildren raucously singing “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” in Dutch — their first and only language.

Her days are a blur of frustration. A visit from the police, interviewing her yet again to determine whether she would raise the grandchildren in a radicalized home. A phone call with her lawyer, who is battling the Belgian government to carry out the judge’s order. A rattling train trip to Brussels alongside other grandmothers who are pushing policymakers to repatriate the children. An anxious Googling of prison conditions in Deir al-Zour, Syria, where she was worried her daughter, daughter-in-law and grandchildren had been taken after they dropped out of contact for more than two weeks last month.

When they finally resurfaced, they reported that Kurdish authorities had blindfolded them and transferred them not to Deir al-Zour but to a more brutal camp than they’d been in previously. One of Fatiha’s grandsons has chronic diarrhea, and now he has only a single pair of pants, his mother said. Another has asthma but no medicine.

“Everything keeps getting worse,” Fatiha’s daughter, Bouchra Abouallal, 25, said in an interview with The Washington Post via a messaging service. “I keep telling the children, ‘Don’t be afraid. Nothing is going to happen.’ But they’re not stupid anymore.”

After the December court order, “we told our children, ‘We’re almost home. We’ll be there in a month,’ ” Abouallal said, her voice cracking.

A boy’s voice interrupted. “Why are you crying?”

“It’s now they who are calming me down, not the other way around,” Abouallal told The Post.


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Fatiha looks at pictures from the wedding of her son, who was later killed in Syria, and her daughter-in-law, who remains there.​


By Fatiha’s account, her family’s problems started with her 2009 divorce from her children’s father, which sent them searching elsewhere for support.

The family had worn its faith lightly. Fatiha said they practiced “modern Islam.” But her eldest son, Noureddine Abouallal, fell in with an Antwerp group called Sharia4Belgium — which would later be connected to 2015 and 2016 terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. Noureddine Abouallal shaved his hair and grew a beard. He and his wife — Tatiana Wielandt, who converted to Islam to marry him in 2010 — marked their son’s birth with an announcement that included images of a fighter and a gun.

Bouchra Abouallal and her husband also joined Sharia4Belgium.

In 2013, when eager adherents of jihadism were streaming toward the fighting, the two couples went with their babies to Syria. The men were killed within a year. Abouallal and Wielandt — both pregnant with their dead husbands’ children, and each with an older son in tow — returned to Belgium in 2014. The state didn’t seek to prosecute them then.

Fatiha said she was furious that they had run away, but she let them back in her life. Abouallal and Wielandt crammed into a bunk bed. Two baby boys were born. Their toddler sons settled in at a school two doors down.

Once, at a backyard barbecue, one grandson dived under a table as a plane flew overhead — perhaps a reaction ingrained from bombings. But otherwise the boys showed little evidence of what they had been through, Fatiha said.

Then one day in 2015, they all disappeared, leaving Fatiha with a house full of toys and a child-size Nutella handprint on the door to the yard.

“I felt like I was stabbed in my back. I felt like I didn’t want to have anything to do with them,” she said. She left the handprint on her door.

In the end, she said, she decided it was better to keep in touch. The young women made it with their children to the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa. They remarried, but their second husbands were killed about the time Wielandt gave birth to her third child. After Western forces bombarded the city into submission in late 2017, they fled into Kurdish-controlled territory and eventually to the al-Hol camp in northeast Syria.

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“Grandma, do you still have my Spider-Man pajamas?” one grandson asked.​


Her daughter and daughter-in-law ask Fatiha for reminders about what Belgian primary schools teach, so they can try to replicate the lessons. In video clips, the kids show off their somersaults and tumbling. Recently, Abouallal sent a video of Fatiha’s newest granddaughter, born last April, wearing her first headband and plucking at the unfamiliar white elastic as it slipped over her eyes.

“I told them I want to see everything as they grow up,” Fatiha said. “I don’t want to miss a thing.”

But as the Belgian government stalls, and as the security situation in Syria becomes increasingly uncertain, Fatiha and the other grandmothers are growing embittered.

Nabila Mazouz — whose son was caught at the airport as he tried to make his way to Syria — started a support group called Mothers’ Jihad to help fight for the return of Belgians who spent time in the caliphate.

“I understand the government. I understand the security issues,” Mazouz said. “But I guarantee they’re going to come back, and if they come back in 15 to 20 years, what kind of mood are they going to come back in?”

She said that after being repeatedly spurned by Belgian authorities, she now better understands her son’s disaffection.

“I never asked myself, ‘Am I Moroccan or Belgian?’ I said I was Belgian,” she said. “I was born here. I work here. I pay my taxes here. But now I ask myself. Now the parents understand the perspective of the young adults.”

Advocates for the children in Syria have been targeted with bile.

“Normally, everybody likes what we do,” said Heidi De Pauw, the director of Child Focus, a Belgian organization that is modeled on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States. But for pressing Belgian authorities on this case, she has received death threats and been told that the children should be “drowned like kittens.”

De Pauw and others say the children should not be condemned because their parents made bad decisions.

One psychologist who traveled to Syria in October to assess Belgian children in the camps, including Fatiha’s grandchildren, said despite everything they have been through, their play and development were relatively normal.

“We were really surprised about how these children were doing,” said Gerrit Loots, a child psychologist at the Free University of Brussels. “Once these children have adapted, they can go to school. They can be with others.”

Loots said his greatest concern was how attached the children were to their mothers. “They’ve never spent a day apart,” he noted.

He said taking the children back to Belgium without their mothers would be “psychologically disastrous.” Bringing them all back together, even assuming the mothers go straight to prison, would be easier to manage, Loots concluded.

The mothers say they want to return, but they are ready to stay behind in Syria if that’s the cost of getting their children back to Belgium and safety.

“I have no problem with that,” Abouallal said. “I just want my children to have a secure life and have a normal life, and that they don’t punish them for the mistakes we’ve made.”

Fatiha sucked in her breath, then dabbed a tear, as her daughter described conditions in their new camp.

“Try to keep them busy,” Fatiha urged her daughter. “Tell them a story.”

“I love you,” the grandmother told them all, before she hung up the phone and slumped into her couch.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...0cd4f7926f2_story.html?utm_term=.6ba2ec61e0e4
 
Son of Jamin said:
Germany is in the process of charging a woman named Jennifer W.

BERLIN — While devoted followers of the Islamic State, a man and woman bought a 5-year-old Yazidi girl in Iraq to use as a slave, then let her die of thirst in the scorching heat, the German authorities contend. The trial of the woman began on Tuesday — one of the highest-profile cases against a female member of the terrorist group.
merlin_153258195_cfb40a32-8447-4664-b29e-5009b1850267-superJumbo.jpg

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/world/europe/germany-isis-trial.html

She will probably help make Germany Great Again...
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Disgusting subhuman piece of shit.
 
Arkain2K said:
Thread Index:

The captured ISIS fighters that nobody wants
Analysis by Nick Paton Walsh, CNN | February 13, 2018

​


The final stages of the anti-ISIS battle swept up a large number of ISIS fighters, including many foreigners. Some may have been allowed to leave Raqqa, the so-called capital of the caliphate, in the final deal agreed between the Syrian Kurds and ISIS to reduce civilian casualties, under which dozens of ISIS fighters, foreign and Syrian, fled with civilians into the desert.

Other ISIS fighters have been on the run longer. Some are unknown players, but some are also noted criminals, like the so-called "Beatles" -- British ISIS fighters who taunted western audiences as they tortured and executed bound, unarmed hostages kneeling before them.

Notably, five days after their capture, the UK has made no public statement about what it wants to do with the two surviving "Beatles," named by US intelligence sources as El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey. There is clearly a reluctance to put them on public trial in the UK. Perhaps it is out of a fear that it would give them a platform for their extremist beliefs. But there is also a risk of failure -- it may be hard to gather convincing evidence of crimes committed in a far away land. The remains of many victims have yet to be located.

There is one possible solution. When US forces detain someone on the anti-ISIS battlefield, they sometimes hand them over to Iraqi security forces. Iraq is the only functional state where ISIS has territory, and with which the US has a diplomatic relationship. They have also been trying those ISIS fighters caught in their territory quickly and putting many on death row. Many detainees may have been to Iraq as well as Syria, perhaps putting their conduct under Iraqi jurisdiction.

In the meantime, the legal complications are mounting -- as is the number of detainees -- in a detention facility that's far from ideal. It is extraordinary that after nearly 17 years since the September 11 attacks, and after four years combating ISIS at home and abroad, Europe's capitals still stumble when working out what to do with this latest variation of defeated extremist.



Let me get this straight: Politicians in liberal Europe refuses to strip Citizenship from their own terrorists who fought for ISIS, yet don't want anything to do with the aforementioned Citizens after they're captured? o_O

I better not see any fake outrage from those countries when their home-grown jihadists start swinging from the ropes, after they refused to do anything about it. :rolleyes:


Update: What the fuck?! o_O



Britain isn't confident that their justice system is robust enough to deal with with own British-born terrorist, and now they want to give us instruction on how to do the job? o_O

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I think the government should have a talk like this with them
 
AlexDB9 said:
You want a normal life now huh? Tooba....d
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Yeah F her. No repentance at all. For what she did, she shouldn't see freedom til she's old, or dead. She deserves nothing. You walk away and try to destroy civilization, you get what is coming
 
ElKarlo said:
Yeah F her. No repentance at all. For what she did, she shouldn't see freedom til she's old, or dead. She deserves nothing. You walk away and try to destroy civilization, you get what is coming
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She is a woman though. So she expects nothing for her actions and it is of course someone else’s fault
 
cincymma79 said:
She is a woman though. So she expects nothing for her actions and it is of course someone else’s fault
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Seems it's the case across the board here. Even owning and allowing a slave girl to be killed, yet they expect forgiveness? My daughter is 5, and that woman is a monster for even owning a slave girl of that Ave, and let her be killed. None of these jihad whores should be allowed back. They deserve to rot in camos until the world forgets about them. Then let the extra judicial justice begin
 
ElKarlo said:
Seems it's the case across the board here. Even owning and allowing a slave girl to be killed, yet they expect forgiveness? My daughter is 5, and that woman is a monster for even owning a slave girl of that Ave, and let her be killed. None of these jihad whores should be allowed back. They deserve to rot in camos until the world forgets about them. Then let the extra judicial justice begin
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We should have let isis form a country, wait ten years so all the people would go there and then bomb it
 
cincymma79 said:
We should have let isis form a country, wait ten years so all the people would go there and then bomb it
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Yep, send money and all that too. Attract all the flies and then turn it to glass. If only we were smart enough to kill our enemies and not spend our soldier's lives on nonsense
 
The issue of children born to Jihadi brides does seem much more ethically difficult than of the brides themselves. If they've been born to citizens of a country (and would normally receive citizenship that way) they probably should be bought back to that country. Even if it will most likely lead to a life in foster care,
 
aunshi189 said:
The issue of children born to Jihadi brides does seem much more ethically difficult than of the brides themselves. If they've been born to citizens of a country (and would normally receive citizenship that way) they probably should be bought back to that country. Even if it will most likely lead to a life in foster care,
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From the stories I have been reading, most of the ISIS brides refuses when the countries that they left behind offer to take their innocent children back and put in foster care.

One could surmise that mothers don't want to parted from their babies, but I'm incline to think that these proud citizens of the Caliphate are risking their kids' lives in these camps, knowing that bargaining chip is their last hope to ever make it back.

A sort of reverse-anchor baby situation, if you will.
 
Heres a simple idea
They chose that life , they speak arabic etc
Why not send them afghanistan that way they can continue to live in a backward shithole like they chose to ? They rejected western values and the advantages that comes with that and can live with their choices
 
Iraq sentences all 11 French ISIS suspects to death
Agence France-Presse | June 04, 2019

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BAGHDAD, Iraq – A Iraqi court Monday, June 3, sentenced to death two more French nationals for joining the Islamic State group, leaving all 11 Frenchmen transferred from Syria facing the gallows and potentially opening the door for other cases.

Bilel Kabaoui, 32, and Mourad Delhomme, 41, join 9 other French citizens and a Tunisian national already on death row after trials over the past week. They have 30 days to appeal the sentences.

The group was handed over to Iraqi authorities early this year by a US-backed force in Syria which expelled IS from its last bastion.

On the stand in Baghdad, Delhomme said he was "known within IS as the one who never pledged allegiance or worked" for the ultra-extremist group.

For an hour, the man who went by Abu Ayman explained to the judge in great detail how he entered Syria to save the wife of a friend taken captive by rebels after her husband died fighting in the ranks of IS.

Although he denied it at trial, Delhomme told investigators he joined the Tariq Ibn Ziyad brigade, an IS unit described by US officials as "a European foreign terrorist fighter cell".

The group was charged with carrying out attacks in Iraq and Syria and planning others in Paris and Brussels.

Iraq has convicted more than 500 foreign men and women of joining IS since the start of 2018.

Its courts have condemned many to life in prison and others to death, although no foreign IS members have yet been executed.

Kabaoui, for his part, pleaded the error of youth.

"Five years ago I was super stupid. I was convinced that I could leave Syria when I wanted to," he told the judge.

He claimed he asked his family in France to contact French intelligence to find a way for him to return with his wife and 3 children – it was on that advice that he surrendered to US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria in late 2017.

'A historic risk'

France has long insisted its adult citizens captured in Iraq or Syria must face trial before local courts, while stressing its opposition to capital punishment.

French government spokeswoman Sibeth Ndiaye reiterated Sunday, June 2, that officials were intervening "at the highest level" in the cases.

On Sunday, France's state secretary at the interior ministry Laurent Nunez said "other (French citizens) could be tried" in Iraq.

"I cannot give you the exact numbers but we will have others," he said.

Some 450 French nationals accused of links to IS are currently detained in Syria.

Iraq offered in April to put on trial hundreds of accused foreign jihadists in Baghdad in exchange for millions of dollars, potentially solving a legal conundrum for Western governments but also sparking rights concerns.

A group of prominent French lawyers said on Monday that the execution of French jihadists on death row would be a disgrace for France.

"We have taken a historic risk, which, if it is realized, will leave an indelible stain on the mandate of (President) Emmanuel Macron," said the lawyers, including some of the country's best known legal professionals such as William Bourdon, Henri Leclerc and Vincent Brengarth.

It would mean allowing a "legal assassination which is now proscribed by the majority of countries on the planet," said the open letter, published on the website of radio station Franceinfo.

Human Rights Watch, for its part, has accused Iraqi interrogators of "using a range of torture techniques... which would not leave lasting marks on the person's body".

It also condemned France's "outsourcing" of trials of IS suspects to "abusive justice systems" and criticised Iraq's "routine failure... to credibly investigate torture allegations".

Iraqi law provides for the death penalty, which is carried out by hanging, for anyone joining a "terrorist group" -- even those who did not take up arms.
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https://www.rappler.com/world/regio...ences-french-isis-suspects-to-death-june-2019

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"France has long insisted its adult citizens captured in Iraq or Syria must face trial before local courts, while stressing its opposition to capital punishment."

LOL, fucking French. They don't want anything to do with it, and still virtue-signalling while knowing damn well what's going to happen. What do they expect, that the Iraqi will provide terrorists with subsidized housing like they do in Europe?

If you don't want your people swinging from an Iraqi rope according to Iraqi laws, grow some balls and take them back to put on trial yourself, if you dare.​
 
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French ISIS Supporters on Death Row in Iraq Ask for Mercy
By Alissa J. Rubin | June 3, 2019

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The Iraqi Criminal Court in Baghdad’s Karkh district, where the trials for 11 French citizens and one French resident were held.​

BAGHDAD — The French government came under criticism Monday from human rights advocates as Iraqi terrorism courts completed the trials of 11 French citizens and one French resident, sentencing all of them to death for support of the Islamic State.

Human rights advocates believe that the Iraqi law, which criminalizes belonging to a terrorist organization, falls short in delivering justice because it does not consider the underlying crime.

By failing to address that, both the rights of the accused and the victims get short shrift, said Belkis Wille, the senior researcher for Iraq for Human Rights Watch.

“You don’t have a real examination of what the defendants did,” Ms. Wille said. “Some of them were war criminals but you have a trial and conviction and sentencing without anyone finding out what war crimes they were implicated in.”

This approach also makes it impossible to modulate the punishments to reflect the gravity of the crime, she said.

Forty five prominent French defense lawyers signed a letter published on France Info that blasted the government, saying it violated the constitution by risking the execution of its citizens and more generally using the threat of terrorism to justify an overall erosion of protections for suspects and detainees.

But French government officials said the trials had been fair and implied that there could be more cases to come. There are some 450 French citizens in camps in Syria who joined the Islamic State, according to France’s Foreign Ministry.

“These are people who left French territory to combat France among others, and they are guilty of terrible violence, notably in Iraq,” said Laurent Nuñez, the junior interior minister, to Le Parisien newspaper.

“This is a sovereign state that dispenses justice,” he said. “We have no reason to oppose having these individuals judged there.”

He also pledged that France would try to get the sentences commuted to life.

The final two cases of 12 were heard Monday in the Iraqi capital in an open courtroom and in the presence of French consular officials.

The French defendants were captured in Syria and transferred to Iraq by the American backed Kurdish forces that have been fighting the Islamic State in Syria.

The defendants were accused of violating an Iraqi terrorism law by joining a terrorist organization, the Islamic State. Any specific crimes they might have committed, and whether they ever set foot in Iraq, were not factors in determining their culpability under that law.

Judge Ahmed Ali Mohammed, who heard all 12 cases, said that the French who joined the Islamic State played a special role by legitimizing the organization in the eyes of the world, and that what it did in Syria reverberated in Iraq.

“Daesh wanted to be an international organization and thousands of Syrians and Iraqis joined it,” Mr. Mohammed said, using the Arabic term for the Islamic State. “That had an impact on Iraq.”

“The foreigners — the Belgians, the French — they came and created legitimacy for this organization,” he said.

The defendants who appeared in the tidy Iraqi courtroom over the past week included committed jihadis as well as more hapless Islamic State adherents who figured out how to get to Syria but not how to leave, which was considerably harder since the Islamic State generally confiscated recruits’ passports and other papers.

Among the defendants were two converts to Islam, both with long jihadi histories: Kévin Gonot and Léonard Lopez.

Mr. Lopez had been one of the founders of Sanabil, an organization that supported Muslim detainees in France and was eventually shut down by prosecutors. He also helped run an extremist website, and went to Syria and Iraq with his family.

Mr. Gonot, who came from a rural area of southwest France, persuaded his entire family to convert to Islam and go with him to Syria. He married Jennifer Clain, the niece of two well known French jihadis, Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain, who were both killed in Syria in the last six months.

The Clain brothers were the first to announce that the Islamic State was responsible for the attacks in and around Paris in November 2015.

Also in the French group were Fodil Aouidate and Vianney Ouraghi, both known to French intelligence, according to the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism in Paris. Mr. Aouidate was a persuasive recruiter and got 22 of his relatives to join him in Syria. It is unclear what else he did in Syria and Iraq.

Mr. Ouraghi, who was a university student from Lille but joined the Nusra Front in 2013, before switching to the Islamic State, was an active fighter. He was wounded twice, he said.

Mr. Mohammed, the judge, said that according to Iraqi intelligence, he had worked in a welcome center for foreign fighters in Mosul.

Mr. Mohammed appeared to disapprove of Mr. Ouraghi’s statement that he had taken a second wife after being injured in an Islamic State battle. Their interchange was one of the few moments of humor in the trial.

“You said you got injured twice and were on medication, and had to to use crutches to walk from 2014 to 2016,” Mr. Mohammed asked. “So how come you got married to two wives?”

“What does my using crutches or being injured have to do with my getting married,” said Mr. Ouraghi, who had earlier said he had been shot in the pelvis.

“But you were suffering from a pelvic injury, so why did you get married twice?” pressed Mr. Mohammed.

“I got married because I could,” Mr. Vianney said.

In contrast, Mohammed Merzoughi, who was a 10-year veteran of the French army, and Mohammed Berriri, 24, the youngest of the group, who came “to defend the weak, women and children,” whom he saw being bombed and neglected on videos, seemed to have wanted to believe that a new life in Syria would make them happy and give them the jobs and sense of identity they lacked at home in France.

Mr. Berriri went by himself to Syria. The Islamic State assigned him to work as a guard and then in a medical office, but eventually he refused, saying he wanted to leave. He ended up in an Islamic State prison.

“When I came I was radical and angry at people, but I thought the wars were for the good of the people, to defend the people,” he told the court. “Now I regret that I joined.”

“I never killed anyone, I did not beat anyone,” he said. “And the criminal offenses that the organization committed, I am not responsible for.”

Mr. Mohammed was unmoved. Mr. Berriri also received the death sentence.

All 12 verdicts will be appealed, and some already have been, Mr. Mohammed said. The appellate court can change the verdict or overturn the conviction entirely.

The accused also has the right to request a pardon or commutation of sentence from the Iraqi government even if the appellate court has confirmed the sentence.

The final step is a signoff by the Iraqi president. The French government can intervene on behalf of its citizens at the appellate level or in discussions with the government.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/world/middleeast/iraq-islamic-state-syria-france.html
 
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