Joining jihadist movements is not just about conviction or faith – it is also a matter of family, legacy and transitions. On Monday, September 15, before a specially composed criminal court in Paris, the trial of three women began, offering a glimpse into a tangled web of family ties that has ensnared all who entered − a web so strong that it has persisted across generations.
Three women − Christine Allain, 67, Jennyfer Clain, 34, and Mayalen Duhart, 42 − all face charges of joining the Islamic State group (IS) in Syria between 2014 and 2017. Two of them also stand accused of the moral and material abandonment of underage children.
The roots of this case stretch back to the late 1990s in the region around Toulouse (southern France), where the Clain family lived. The two Clain brothers, Fabien and Jean-Michel, came from a devout Catholic family and then converted to strict Islam under the influence of their elder sister Anne-Diana's Tunisian husband. Settling in the Mirail neighborhood of Toulouse, the brothers fell under the sway of Olivier Corel – a Syrian Islamist who had become a French citizen – and themselves became effective proselytizers, starting within their own family. Besides their elder sister, the brothers converted their wives, their half-sister and their mother.
Successive conversions
Anne-Diana's own daughters, Jennyfer and Fanny, were raised under a radical version of Islam and married off at a young age within a close-knit community of hardline Muslim followers. Jennyfer, born in January 1991, entered a religious marriage with Kevin Gonot at age 16; Gonot himself had converted to Islam under the influence of his mother, Allain, who in turn had been converted by Thomas Collange, her eldest son from a previous marriage.
It was the Clain brothers who introduced Collange to the most drastic form of Islam while he was a student in Toulouse. Not wanting to lose him, Mayalen Duhart, his girlfriend at the time, converted as well, encouraged by her future mother-in-law Christine Allain, who had already persuaded her husband Stéphane Gonot to convert by threatening to leave him if he did not become Muslim. These successive conversions occurred in the early 2000s.
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