A 38-year-old French woman repatriated from Syria in 2022 after joining ISIS in Syria has been sentenced to eight years in prison.
Details of the life of the woman, known as Lucie C, were discussed during a three-day trial at the Paris special assize court. She had travelled by car to Syria in 2014 with her partner, a French-Turkish citizen named Omar Y, her brother, his wife and two other people. All came from the eastern city of Vesoul. It has been described as a hotbed of radicalised converts.
In Raqqa, Lucie C felt "at home" and "lived well" in spacious apartments, benefitting from her spouse's status. He held important positions within ISIS's security apparatus in Raqqa and monitored how the group was portrayed online in France. French ISIS recruits were involved in propaganda linked to deadly attacks organised by the group against France in 2015.
"Today, I take responsibility for what I did, I no longer say it's my brother's fault, my husband's fault, no, it's me!" Lucie C said during the trial, in quotes attributed to her by the French magazine Politis. “In prison, I was finally able to take time for myself ... I saw a mediator on religious issues who helped me understand the difference between ideology and religion.”
Lucie C was a convert, like 23 per cent of French citizens who left for the ISIS-controlled parts of Iraq and Syria, according to the General Directorate for Internal Security. She had two children before travelling to Syria and gave birth to a third while living in Raqqa.
Her children are now aged 16, 12 and eight, and were repatriated by the state in 2021 and handed over to child welfare services. They had been held with Lucie C and other foreign ISIS recruits in Kurdish-controlled camps in north-east Syria. They have reportedly been seeing their mother once a month since she returned to France.
Lucie C said that "in the early years, I was intensely indoctrinated, radicalised". When Raqqa was besieged in 2017, Lucie C wrote to her father that she was "no one's prisoner" and was ready to die "with her head held high". She was eventually expelled from the city in a "cattle truck" and "survived" through months of chaos, taking shelter in stables or holes dug in the ground before ISIS lost its final scrap of territory in the battle of Baghuz in February and March 2019.
The sentence handed down on Monday is less than the 12 years in prison sought by the prosecution. It includes an obligation to undergo treatment as well as five years of socio-judicial monitoring with an obligation to find a job.
