Former ISIS Member Faces Trial in Paris for Terrorist Conspiracy

For three days, the special assize court of Paris will try the 32-year-old Moroccan Douha M., who had joined the ranks of the Islamic State (IS) group. She had gone to Syria for the first time at the end of 2013 then in the summer of 2015, reports Sud Ouest. Her arrest took place in Turkey in 2017. The Turkish authorities had then deported her to France. "These three days of trial will make it possible to decipher the real springs of her journey and to demonstrate that at the present time she does not represent a danger for society," assures her lawyer, Joseph Hazan.

The adventure begins for this woman in training to become a midwife in 2013. Months earlier, she became radicalized by watching videos on the Internet. She had left France to settle with her grandparents in Morocco. At the age of 23, she decides to go to Syria. She crosses Spain, France and arrives in Turkey, where she meets a Tunisian smuggler who will become her first husband after she has set the condition: to join Syria.

In November 2013, Douha and her husband joined Syria. But her stay in Atma, a Syrian town near the Turkish border, lasts very little due to a complicated pregnancy. She returns to Turkey, then to France "in the spring of 2014, where she gives birth to a son who dies the next day." In 2015, she tries to leave for Syria again. Several attempts to join the country from France, Mauritania, Morocco or Macedonia fail. She manages to leave in the summer of 2015, with her new Tunisian husband and the latter’s son, a few months old. But before that, she steals her mother’s identity card and steals jewelry to finance the trip.

It emerges from the investigations that "while her husband fights within the Islamic State group, Douha M. exercises a midwife activity, in Iraq and Syria." After the birth of her daughter in September 2016, in Raqqa, she left IS at the end of 2016. Douha then joins a city under the control of the Free Syrian Army before returning to Turkey in March 2017. She will be arrested and then handed over to the French authorities.