France Repatriates 9 Children of ISIS Members, Including Relatives of Paris Attack Planners

After spending several years under the caliphate, with their parents, nine children aged 3 to 13 are back in France. They had joined the Islamic State group in 2014.

Five of them are great-nephews and great-nieces of Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain, the media-savvy jihadists who had recorded the claim of responsibility for the November 13, 2015 attacks, said France Inter.

These children did not return home alone. They were accompanied by their mothers and a grandmother. Jennifer Clain, 28, is the mother of five of these children. She is one of the daughters of Anne-Diana Clain, the elder sister of Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain, feared jihadists, the same source specifies.

While Jennifer Clain, actively wanted, was fleeing to Syria with her children, she was arrested at the Turkish-Syrian border along with her mother-in-law, Christine Allain, 61. The latter was also accompanied by her sister-in-law, Maïalen Duhart, wife of the jihadist Thomas Collange (half-brother of Kevin Gonot), with their four children.

These three women and the nine children were then immediately placed in a detention center in Turkey, as with each arrest of a jihadist family, for years.

But they were all released and systematically expelled to Paris after a few weeks, due to a protocol signed between France and Turkey in this sense since 2014.

Upon their return, the Directorate General of Internal Security (DGSI) arrested and detained these three women as part of their arrest warrant. They were also presented to an anti-terrorism investigating judge as part of an investigation for criminal terrorist conspiracy.

They have already been indicted. As for the children, they were separated from their mothers upon landing and entrusted by the courts to the Child Welfare Service.