A repeated commitment that is very difficult to defend. Tried for having joined a jihadist organization in Syria three times via a British network, a 34-year-old French woman was sentenced to 9 years in prison by the specially composed Paris Assize Court, the national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office (Pnat) said on Saturday. ) to the AFP.
Farrah Zerari was on trial for participation in a terrorist conspiracy. His name emerged in May 2017 during an administrative investigation in France. Farrah Zerari will be arrested there in January 2021, almost two years after her return to France. His trial on Thursday and Friday retraced his journey.
Adolescence in “Londonistan”
His childhood in the Lyon region was marked by tensions with his mother and the divorce of his parents, the start of adolescence by isolation after leaving for London with his hairdresser father. It was the beginning of the 2000s and the British capital then nicknamed “Londonistan” saw some 850 individuals from the radical Islamist movement leave for the Iraqi-Syrian zone.
Farrah Zerari, just an adult and just out of rehab, without a diploma, turns to strict Islam. Between 2013 and 2021, she successively settled in Turkey, Dubai, Qatar, and made three stays in Syria, punctuated by stopovers in France where she gave birth to two children. She decides to marry religiously, by telephone, a stranger she met online: Choukri Ellekhlifi, whom she meets in 2013 in Atma, a town close to the Turkish border and won by conflicts between two jihadist groups that have become rivals, the Al-Front. Nusra and ISIL, which became the Islamic State.
Two husbands heavily involved in jihadism
She claims to discover on the spot that Ellekhlifi is a soldier but “takes him as he is”. He died a few days later. According to the British press, he belongs to the al-Nusra Front and worked alongside Mohamed Emwasi, a figure in the so-called “Beatles” group of jailers and hostage executioners.
As for her second husband, Youssef Hassouni, whose second wife she became four months later, “he is waging war,” says the accused, swearing she does not know to which faction he belongs. It would be Daesh (Arabic acronym for IS) according to the British authorities. French investigators establish that the accused learned online about the participation of women in jihad and death as a martyr. A video shows her in a niqab (full veil covering the face except for the eyes), firing a Kalashnikov.
At the trial, with a long ponytail and jeans, she hides the fights. “I didn’t hear the war,” she said. “At one point in my life, I was radicalized,” she admits, but without “never having adhered” to jihadist ideology. She becomes the twentieth woman convicted in France since 2012 for joining a terrorist organization, according to the attorney general, who had requested 11 years of imprisonment with a two-thirds security period.