French nationals Hanen Ben Chaieb and Selma Tahar Aouidate were extradited to France by the Turkish authorities during the last week of July under a police cooperation agreement signed between Paris and Ankara in September 2014, called the “Cazeneuve protocol”, after the name of the then French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve.
Under the agreement, France is required to take back its nationals whenever Turkey demands so. In the case of the two women sent back at the end of July, they were among a group of seven women arrested more than a year ago in a zone in Syria controlled by the Turkish army. Following their arrests, they were held in a detention camp, housed in bungalows, at Jarablus, a town on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey.
The conditions, according to one of them, were “cool”, with their children receiving English-language lessons. But upon their arrival back in France, during the last week of July, that changed for the two mothers, who were each the subject of an international arrest warrant. They were swiftly presented before an examining magistrate and placed under investigation for “associating” with others “with the aim of a terrorist criminal project”, and put into preventive detention.
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Returning French former Islamic State group members, both men and women, face the same procedure once on French soil. “Today, the French returning from jihad are ever more numerous to appear before a special court where they risk up to 30 years in jail,” said Sacha Belissa, head of the judicial affairs department with a France-based think tank, the Centre for the Analysis of Terrorism. “Criminal law policies in our country have hardened towards them, although sentences remain less than for men. For women, the judges rarely go above eight years in prison.”
The cases of the two women who returned last month are of particular interest to the justice authorities and the intelligence services. Ben Chaieb and Aouidate travelled to Syria in 2014 to join the ranks of the Islamic State group (IS), as part of a project shared by numerous members of their families.
When 26 family members joined the jihad
Aouidate left her home in the north-east French town of Roubaix in May 2014, one of 26 people in her family to have left France for Syria to take part in the jihad; her brother, Fodil Tahar Aouidate, obsessed by the idea of joining the combat with IS, convinced their parents and six of his sisters and their husbands to travel to Syria with their children.
Selma Tahar Aouidate and her four children have returned to France alone. Her brother Fodil was sentenced to death in Iraq in June 2019. Three of her sisters are detained in a camp run by Kurdish authorities in north-east Syria. The other members of her family who left for Syria, including several children, died in the region.
According to sources, Selma Tahar Aouidate appears to have been worried about the consequences for her of a return to France, but had not taken measure of the criminal case against her for joining the Islamic State group in Syria. Before her extradition, she recently wrote to one of her contacts in France asking: “What would be the prison sentence for a woman who has no other charge against her other than coming to Syria?”
Several sources said that at the time of her arrest close to the Turkish border, she had not intended to give herself up, but rather had hoped to cross into Turkey with false Syrian identity papers and then go into hiding.
A family group of 11 travel to Syria by road
Hanen Ben Chaieb also hoped to hide in Turkey and escape being brought before French magistrates. She was arrested in Syria while travelling with false Syrian ID documents.
At the time, none of the 11 members of her family had thus far been detained, despite leaving their homes in the south-east city of Nice for Syria in a convoy of several hired vehicles, crossing Europe to Turkey and then on to Syria where they joined the ranks of IS.
On their arrival, Oussama Ben Chaieb, the head of the family group, soon gained an important post within the very active media branch of the terrorist group. According to sources, he disappeared in Baghouz in eastern Syria in March 2019, shortly before IS was territorially defeated in the country. It is not known whether he was killed, or whether he was taken into detention by the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-Arab alliance allied to the international coalition against IS on the ground, who captured the town.
However, the sister of Hanen Ben Chaieb her mother, brothers-in-law and several children from the family died in the region. Hanen is the only one of the convoy that left Nice who can potentially offer information to the justice authorities in France about the experiences of the group in Syria, and notably the activities of her brother Oussama, who was close to the prominent French IS members Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain, jihadist brothers who converted to Islam and who were separately killed in 2019.
End of the road for ‘very psychologically tired’ Lolita
Lolita is another French woman jihadist held by the Turkish authorities, and who is due to be extradited to France this month. Her return will mark the end of seven years of wandering for her and her four children.
Originally from a Paris suburb, Lolita left France for Syria in August 2014. A divorcee, she took with her both her son and daughter, then aged 5 and 4 respectively. After arriving in Syria, she married several times again, giving birth to two more children. She was finally detained in early 2019 by the Syrian Democratic Forces and was first held, along with her four children, in the Ayn Issa camp, close to the Syrian town of Raqqa, once the stronghold of the IS. In October 2019, during an offensive by Turkish armed forces, the Kurdish authorities opened the gates to the camp, when she and her children escaped.
She travelled towards the north-west Syrian town of Idlib, then under the control of the Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist group considered by the United Nations to be a terrorist movement, and which was the last site held by armed Syrian opponents of the Damascus regime of Bashar al-Assad. Once in Idlib, she married a Syrian national, although their relationship lasted just a few months. In August 2020, Lolita gave herself up to the Turkish authorities. Mediapart has seen several text messages she sent to contacts. “I am above all very psychologically tired,” she wrote in one. “I no longer want to make my children suffer all this. My two eldest are impatient to return to France, they want to see their father again. A few minutes later, she added: “I know that in France they’ll be well taken care of. I’m thinking of their future.”
Processing the returning children
Lolita’s children, like those of Hanen Ben Chaieb and Selma Tahar Aouidate, will be taken into the care of the French child social care services, the Aide Sociale à l’Enfance (ASE), as soon as they disembark from the plane at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport. After a brief hospitalisation, those who are aged 12 or above can by law be questioned by the French domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI.
The care procedures for children returning with parents from the Syria former warzone are now well-oiled. Following a ruling by a family affairs judge, they will be placed in care either with a foster family or in an ASE hostel. While they will be given the opportunity of re-establishing links with their families in France, the procedure is a long one; it involves a series of meetings with childcare workers, including psychiatrists, psychologists and teaching professionals. One psychologist with experience of the process described the multiple consultations the children are submitted to as being as busy as “a minister’s agenda”.
The priority for the authorities is to get the children back into school as soon as possible in order to begin a return to a form of normality. Some have never seen a classroom since their parents took them away from France, while others, born in Syria or Iraq, have simply never known what a school looks like.
The French jihadists and children remaining in Syria
According to an estimation by the United Nations, around 40,000 supporters of IS from 100 different countries travelled to join the ranks of the terrorist group. Among them were 1,450 French nationals. Of these, around 300 have returned to France by their own means or after being extradited by Turkey in the framework of the so-called “Cazeneuve” agreement. Another 400 are believed to have died in the Syria-Iraq warzone.
According to French intelligence services, in 2021 nearly 200 adult French nationals were being held in detention in north-east Syria. These included 121 women held in two camps for displaced people run by Kurdish authorities. The women are reportedly accompanied by nearly 300 children of French nationality.
Thirty-five children, most of them orphans, have been repatriated in several operations led by France’s foreign affairs ministry.
Since the territorial defeat of the Islamic State in March 2019, the French presidency has maintained the same policy towards adult detainees accused of crimes, namely that they are not allowed to return to France and must be tried in the Syria-Iraq region where they are held.
Only orphans, and children whose mothers accept that they depart without them, are brought back to France by the authorities. According to sources, at least eight orphaned French minors are still present in the camp of Roj in north-east Syria, awaiting repatriation.
In a March 2021 interview with French daily Le Figaro, Laurent Nuñez, the national coordinator of France’s intelligence and counter-terrorism services, estimated that around 160 French jihadists were still at large in Syria, the majority in the province of Idlib, the last rebel-held enclave in Syria and under the control of the Sunni Islamist group Tahrir al-Sham. According to sources, nearly 80 French adults still live in that area among a group led by Omar Omsen, a French national of Senegalese origin who acted as one of the principal recruiters of French jihadists for IS.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse