This is the first time that she has testified in a judicial chamber. Jennifer Clain, the niece of Jean-Michel and Fabien Clain, the French voices of the Islamic State group, was heard, Wednesday, December 15, in videoconference by the special assize court of Paris, on the sixtieth day of the trial of the attacks of 13 -November. This 30-year-old young woman, in pre-trial detention, appeared on the broadcast screens of the courtroom. Pale face eaten away by a surgical mask, brown hair pulled back by a ponytail, it discloses its identity: “Madame Clain Jennifer, Gaëlle, Séverine, 30 years old.” “I was a stay-at-home mother, today I am a student, living at the Beauvais penitentiary center”, she adds.
President Jean-Louis Périès completes the presentation: “You are still awaiting judgment.” Jennifer Clain nods. Indicted for criminal conspiracy, she is one of the “ghosts” of Syria and the few survivors of the Clain family. Arrested in July 2019 on the border between Turkey and Syria while fleeing the country with her five children, she was deported to France in September with two other jihadist women. Her husband, Kevin Gonot, was sentenced to death in Iraq for joining the ranks of ISIS.
Jennifer Clain, who left school in eighth grade, married him religiously at the age of 15. Like all her family of Catholic faith and of Reunion origin, this Toulouse woman converted to Islam. “Looking back, this choice was not always mine, but now it is mine”, assumes the thirties. The day before, an investigator from the DGSI painted the portrait of a clan that lived “according to the principles of Sharia” and organized “around the matriarch”, Marie-Rosanne.
Raised in this atmosphere, Jennifer Clain is one of the first to settle in the caliphate, in July 2014, shortly after her uncle Jean-Michel Clain and the latter’s wife, Dorothée Maquerre. They were joined in February 2015 by Marie-Rosanne, her son Fabien Clain and a little later his wife, Mylène Foucre. With the children already born or to be born, four generations are on site. Among the Clains, jihad is carried out with the family.
On the role of her two uncles in the attacks of November 13, Jennifer Clain shows little talk. The Clain brothers, judged by default because presumed dead, are not only behind the messages calling for the attacks but also suspected of having had a role in the preparations for the attacks. “When I spoke to them about it, they never let it be believed that they had been able to participate in this”, underlines the young woman.
“It might be hard to hear, but if it had really been them, it would have been a source of pride to say it.”
Jennifer clainbefore the special assize court of Paris
If Jennifer Clain doesn’t stretch much, she says, it’s because she got angry with them for a year. “Because of the attacks?”, hopes the president. “No, for a completely different subject”, she evades, eventually explaining that they had arrested “people I knew, who they thought could rebel against Daesh”. Jennifer Clain unvarnishedly lifts the veil on the climate of terror that reigned under the Caliphate. And admits having adhered to it.
The videos of abuse she has “all views”, were broadcast on “giant screens” in the place of Raqqa, like that of the Jordanian pilot immolated in a cage. “He had sent firebombs, so I thought that was normal”, she justifies. Ditto for the beheading videos. “I didn’t even think about it anymore. If I started questioning it, it was dangerous to my life.”
“When we are there, we forget that we can think for ourselves, we think for the group. It was the law of retaliation. They bombed us, killed civilians so we did the same thing.”
Jennifer clainbefore the special assize court of Paris
“Was it collective blindness?, suggests Jean-Louis Périès.
– Totally.
– What is such a political regime called?
– It looks a lot like the Nazi regime, although at the time I didn’t see it that way. “
To the president, who notes that she speaks in the imperfect, Jennifer Clain responds tit for tat: “Everything is imperfect regarding Daesh.” But the reason why she left ISIS has nothing of repentance, unlike the speech given by her mother Anne-Diana Clain, older sister of the two brothers, just before her.
“In 2017, foreigners split into two groups, explains Jennifer Clain confidently. Many people saw that Daesh was not what it claimed to be, including an Islamic state. Leaders did a lot of things for their own benefit rather than for God. “ “Corruption?”, translated the president. “Yes that’s it.” “From the start I saw things that were wrong with the Islam that I followed, completes Jennifer Clain. I think I preferred not to see. “
“It’s hard to accept being wrong after leaving everything.”
Jennifer clainbefore the special assize court of Paris
In December 2017, she decides to flee. “We were a group of about twenty. All the men were arrested by the Kurds, they are all still there, imprisoned.” Today Jennifer Clain has “news from his little sister Fanny” and Mylène Foucre, the wife of Fabien Clain, held in a Kurdish camp in Syria. She also talks with her mother, sentenced at the end of 2019 to nine years in prison for trying to join her whole family in Syria. “I try to make him understand how much we could have been cheated”, launched Anne-Diana Clain at court. Her daughter is “not quite agree” : “We are all guilty of what we did, of what we believed, of what we wanted.”