A “ghost” from the Islamic State (IS) group, who was on trial in Paris for two stays in Syria between 2013 and 2017 interspersed with multiple attempts to leave, was sentenced Wednesday evening to twelve years in prison.
After nearly five hours of deliberation, the special assize court combined this sentence with a two-thirds security period.
The National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat) had requested fourteen years’ imprisonment, including two thirds of security, against the 32-year-old accused.
Douha Mounib, tried since Monday for criminal association of terrorist criminals (AMT), acknowledged at the hearing “the whole” of the facts, assuring that the Islamic State was “past”.
In the box, she told how her “desire” to go to Syria had turned into “obsession” since she became radicalized, a few months before starting a first journey in 2013 to this war zone. , marrying a smuggler she had just met in Turkey.
This first stay had been cut short after two months, due to the instability of the region. Douha Mounib then never stopped wanting to go back to Syria.
After several failures, her “extreme determination” had finally paid off in the summer of 2015: thanks to the identity card stolen from her mother, she had managed to cross the Turkish-Syrian border with her Tunisian second husband and the son of the latter, less than 2 years old.
They had spent fifteen months in Iraq and Syria, successively in Mosul then Raqqa, two cities under the yoke of IS.
For the Advocate General, Douha Mounib delivered a “watered down version” of this second stay, “minimizing” her participation.
The young woman had claimed that her husband had “never fought”, that she herself had not seen any of the “daily atrocities” committed by IS, and that the midwifery activity she had exercised would have been in a “clandestine” way, had underlined the representative of the prosecution.
Douha Mounib had finally left the territories controlled by the IS at the end of 2016, and had been arrested in March 2017 at the Syrian-Turkish border with her daughter aged a few months and her husband’s child.
She had been repatriated to France at the end of 2017 and imprisoned.
Four years later, Douha Mounib had tried to escape from the Fresnes remand center, a fact which was not before the court, but which weighed in its decision.