Spain to Repatriate Jihadists’ Wives from Syria, Prison Likely Awaits

The four women, including one Moroccan, who will be repatriated from Syria in the coming weeks, could face a complicated legal situation upon arrival in Spain. As experienced before them, Asia Ahmed, a young woman of Moroccan origin, who left Ceuta at the age of 20 to join a jihadist in Syria, and Fatima Akil, who made the same trip at the age of 18 with her 10-month-old baby in her arms. Arrested in Turkey and repatriated to Spain in 2017, they were sentenced by the National Court on July 20, 2020 to four years in prison for belonging to a terrorist group, reports El Confidencial.

Asia Ahmed married in March 2014 a man from Fnideq (Morocco), Mohamed Hamduch, better known as Kokito de Fnideq. Asia had a child with him, presumed dead in 2015. Then she remarried Mohamed Ahatim Ouahabi Halawa, another fighter, also killed in combat. A second child was born from this union. Fatima Akil, for her part, married a jihadist named Mourad Kadi, killed in combat. Then she remarried with Abu Saber, who was also killed. These women almost all have the same story. They fall in love with a jihadist and decide to join him.

In a book titled "En el vientre de la yihad (Editorial Debate), Alexandra Gil analyzed the family environments of these radicalized people who embrace jihad and revealed that "most of the mothers of these young people did not know they were radicalized." "Some mothers, believers, thought their sons were getting closer to Islam. In these cases, the young people had a past related to crime or had been to prison," she explains. In a documentary on TVE, two of the women soon to be repatriated from Syria, Yolanda Martínez and Luna Fernández, claim that their husbands are good men, who have always wanted the best for their families and are in no way terrorists.