Three French women, including the niece of notorious jihadist propagandists, went on trial on Monday, September 15, accused of traveling to the Middle East to join the Islamic State (IS) group and taking their eight children with them. The defendants are being tried by a special criminal court in Paris that is sitting without a jury – standard practice in terrorism cases. Each of them faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted.
One of the women is Jennyfer Clain, a 34-year-old niece of Jean-Michel and Fabien Clain, who claimed responsibility on behalf of IS for the attacks on November 13, 2015, when 130 people died in shootings at the Bataclan concert hall and elsewhere. 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 Clain's sister-in-law, Mayalen Duhart, 42, and 67-year-old Christine Allain, the women's mother-in-law. 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.
Leaving Syria with nine children in tow
The women had travelled to Raqqa, the Islamic State group's onetime capital, with their children in 2014. After the 2017 battle for Raqqa, which marked the IS group's defeat, the 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 the country from Syria with nine children, aged between 3 and 13 years old. 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.
Clain and Duhart are also being prosecuted for failing to fulfil their parental obligations, notably for voluntarily taking their eight children to a war zone to join a terrorist group, the indictment said, exposing them to a significant risk of physical and psychological harm.
In their decision to refer the three women to a criminal court, the investigating judges noted that they had stayed with jihadist groups for a long period of time. Allain and her two daughters-in-law were accused of having knowingly chosen to join the Islamic State group in Syria after the caliphate was established, according to the investigating magistrates' indictment, which Agence France-Presse (AFP) was able to consult.
Allain's lawyer said she had worked hard to turn her life around. "She still considers herself a Muslim, but she has only known one interpretation of Islam, the wrong one," he said. "She hates the person she had become."
The trial is scheduled to last until September 26.