French Midwife Who Served ISIS Faces Trial for Terrorism in Paris

On this first day of the hearing, the president of the assize court states the facts attributed to Douha Mounib. Charged with criminal terrorist conspiracy, for having stayed in Syria and Iraq and served the Islamic State (Daesh), the 32-year-old woman faces a sentence of thirty years in criminal confinement. Douha Mounib was born in Nîmes and lived in Montpellier until the age of twenty-two, when she began to take an interest in Islam and radicalize through research on the internet.

In this process of self-indoctrination, the young woman abandoned her midwifery studies, which she found incompatible with her vision of Islam, and decided to emigrate to Morocco where her paternal grandparents lived, before going to Syria in 2013, with a Turkish sports teacher who becomes her husband and they live together for a few months in Raqqa. Then, she becomes pregnant and returns to France in 2014 due to complications of the pregnancy. She gives birth in May to a little boy who died shortly after birth, reports Radio France.

After this tragedy, Douha Mounib tries to return to Syria. Turned back in Turkey, she finally settles in Mauritania where she tries her luck again by passing through Morocco. Without success. She returns to France where she marries a second husband, a Tunisian met on the internet. In February 2015, the couple settles under the Daesh caliphate. In 2016, she informs her father that she is in a village near Mosul, the Iraqi city conquered by Daesh. But she joins Raqqa where she would have integrated a madafa in the summer of 2015, the prosecution claims.

Between July 2015 and March 2016, Douha Mounib made many publications on social networks, including a poem praising death as a martyr. She told her mother that she "had a project to open a health house to help future mothers. She had already bought equipment for that" and that she also had a rifle "in case she had a problem one day." On the stand on Monday, the 55-year-old mother recounts that she left the family home when Douha was 10 years old. The teenager then lived with her father and stepmother. For her father, his daughter is "frank" and "honest".

"Except for a few details, I recognize the overall picture of what you have just read, it is part of my past, I am trying to move forward. What you have read, I know it by heart. In five years, I have thought a lot about everything that happened, about the mechanism. It is a long work that I have done on myself and that I continue to do. I realize that I did all this, but it seems enormous for my shoulders. I realize that I got myself into trouble and put people in danger," Douha Mounib declared from the dock. Her lawyer, Me Joseph Hazan, assures of her sincerity and that she has repented. The trial ends on Wednesday.