PARIS (BN24) — Three French women accused of traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State group and taking eight children with them went on trial in Paris on Monday, including the niece of two jihadist propagandists who claimed responsibility for the deadly 2015 Paris attacks.
Among the defendants is Jennyfer Clain, 34, the niece of Jean-Michel and Fabien Clain. The brothers, who were among the most infamous voices of the Islamic State, claimed the group’s responsibility for the November 13, 2015 attacks that killed 130 people at the Bataclan concert hall and other sites across Paris. Both men are presumed dead, though in 2022 they were sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment without parole.
Clain stands trial alongside her sister-in-law Mayalen Duhart, 42, and her mother-in-law Christine Allain, 67. Each faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted of criminal association with a terrorist enterprise.
The women traveled to Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, in 2014, bringing their young children with them. After the 2017 battle for Raqqa marked the collapse of the group’s caliphate, they remained with retreating fighters for two more years.
In 2019, Turkish authorities detained the women as they attempted to cross into Turkey from Syria with nine children between the ages of 3 and 13, eight of whom had been born in France. They were later expelled to France, where they were charged with terrorism-related offenses.
Clain and Duhart face additional charges of failing in their parental obligations by “voluntarily taking their children to a war zone to join a terrorist group,” exposing them to what prosecutors described as “significant risk of physical and psychological harm.”
Investigating judges who referred the case to trial noted that the women had remained for years embedded in jihadist networks, arguing that their decision to travel to Syria had been made “with full knowledge of the facts” after the declaration of the Islamic State’s caliphate.
The trial is being heard by a special criminal court without a jury, a standard procedure in French terrorism cases.
Duhart is the only defendant to appear in court as a free woman, saying she now works at a bakery. Allain’s lawyer told the court that his client has worked to turn her life around, emphasizing her rejection of extremist ideology.
“She still considers herself a Muslim, but she has only known one interpretation of Islam, the wrong one,” her lawyer said. “She hates the person she had become.”
The trial is scheduled to continue through September 26.
