Mother Faces Trial for Alleged Abandonment of Child in Syria During ISIS Conflict

An unusual trial that opened this Monday before the special assize court in Paris, with the accused, Jihane Makhzoumi, a 38-year-old jihadist woman who had gone to Syria with her husband Eddy Leroux, from August 2014 to October. The couple had taken four children from their respective former spouses without informing them. These are, details Le Parisien, Jana, Eddy Leroux’s daughter from a first marriage, Jihane Makhzoumi’s two daughters aged 3 and 5, also from a first marriage, and finally a six-week-old baby, the fruit of their union.

Expelled from Turkey after her husband’s death, she returned to France in October 2016, only with her children, without little Jana. "It’s been five years and three months since I’ve seen my daughter, the last time I handed Jana over to her father, he had told me he wanted to go to Morocco. When I learned that he had taken her to Syria, it was a nightmare. Because Jana, that’s everything to me," testifies, inconsolable, Ilham Tarbouni, mother of the 8-year-old girl.

In addition to the terrorist charges she will have to answer to, Jihane, who is also being prosecuted for child abandonment, claimed during the hearing that the child had been entrusted, after her father’s death, to a Libyan national, also rallied to the Daesh cause. According to her, she would have tried to recover her custody by seizing an Islamic court on the spot, but in vain!

However, the investigating judges think quite the opposite. Relying on a WhatsApp conversation seized by the investigators, and dating from June 2015, they believe that Jihane would have deliberately abandoned the little girl. For the mother of the little girl, "Jihane is not telling the truth, I am convinced that she knows where Jana is and with whom." And to launch another appeal to the authorities to help her: "My daughter is French," she hammered.