Nine years in prison: Farrah Zerari is the twentieth French woman convicted as a member of a jihadist organization

La condamnation est tombée vendredi soir à la cour d’assises de Paris. Illustration MAXPPP – Franz Chavaroche

This 34-year-old French woman was sentenced Friday evening by the special assize court in Paris, after having made several trips to Syria, between 2013 and 2017.

Tried for having joined a jihadist organization in Syria three times via a British network, a 34-year-old French woman was sentenced to nine years in prison by the specially composed assize court in Paris, the national anti-terrorism prosecutor's office (Pnat) told AFP on Saturday.

Farrah Zerari was tried for participating in a terrorist criminal association.

Arrested in 2021, two years after her return from Syria

Her name had emerged in May 2017 during an administrative investigation in France. Farrah Zerari will be arrested there in January 2021, almost two years after her return. His trial on Thursday and Friday retraced his journey.

His childhood in the Lyon region (eastern France) was marked by tensions with his mother and his parents' divorce, and the beginning of his adolescence by isolation after leaving for London with his hairdresser father.

It was the beginning of the 2000s and of “Londonistan”, a radical Islamist movement established at that time in the British capital, which saw some 850 individuals from this movement leave for the Iraqi-Syrian zone.

Turkey, Dubai and Qatar between stays in Syria

Farrah Zerari, barely an adult and out of drug rehabilitation, without a diploma, turns to rigorous Islam. Between 2013 and 2021, she settled successively in Turkey, Dubai, Qatar, and made three trips to Syria, punctuated by stopovers in France where she gave birth to two children.

She decided to marry religiously, by telephone, a stranger she met online: Choukri Ellekhlifi, whom she met again in 2013 in Atma, a town near the Turkish border and gripped by conflicts between two jihadist groups that had become rivals, the Al-Nusra Front and ISIS, which became the Islamic State group (IS).

She claims to discover there that Ellekhlifi is a soldier but he "takes it as it is".He died a few days later.

According to the British press, he belonged to the Al-Nusra Front and had rubbed shoulders with Mohamed Emwasi, a figure in the so-called “Beatles” group of jailers and hostage-killers.

In a niqab with a Kalashnikov

As for her second husband, Youssef Hassouni, whose second wife she became four months later, “he's at war”, the accused blurted out, swearing she didn't know which faction he belonged to. According to British authorities, it is Daesh (the Arabic acronym for IS).

French investigators have established that the accused found out online about women's participation in jihad and martyrdom. A video shows her wearing a niqab (a full veil covering the face except for the eyes), firing a Kalashnikov.

At the trial, wearing a long ponytail and jeans, she hides the fighting.

“At one point in my life, I was radicalized“, she admits, but without “ever having adhered” to jihadist ideology.

She becomes the twentieth woman convicted in France since 2012 for joining an organization terrorist, according to the attorney general, who had requested 11 years of imprisonment with a two-thirds security period.