The specially composed Assize Court of Paris looked for two days at the journey of this 32-year-old woman, tried for having stayed in Syria between 2014 and 2019.
Were the magistrates sensitive to the tears she shed for two days? Amandine Le Coz, 32, was sentenced by the special assize court in Paris on Friday March 3 to ten years’ imprisonment, with two-thirds security, for criminal “terrorist criminal association” after spending four years in the ranks of the Islamic State group in Syria. A sentence slightly lower than the requisitions of the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office, which had requested eleven years of imprisonment, well below the 30 years incurred. In his indictment, Advocate General Benjamin Chambre refuted the only reading grid of a “lost, fragile young girl”. “Far from being a victimized woman, she is a very proactive woman”he asserted, considering that “the path” repentance was “still a long time”.
Amandine Le Coz is one of the first “ghosts” to be tried at the assizes, like Douha Mounib, sentenced just before her to twelve years in prison. These women returned to France long before the establishment of the policy of repatriation of families of jihadists, but after the law of July 21, 2016, which criminalized departures “in the area”. They no longer benefit from “stereotypes” who have “long contributed to minimizing the role of women” within the terrorist organization, as recalled by an investigator from the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) heard by videoconference at the opening of the debates.
“I’m not healed yet”
Behind her opaque glass, anonymity requires, the investigator 1869SI listed the “three categories of returned women” In France : “the penitents”, “stayed for a short time and quickly returned”, “shared ones”torn between “willingness to break and will to maintain a link” with the ideology of the caliphate and “the convinced”with their “intact will and concealment of their intentions and their radicalization”. The accused fairly quickly emerged as belonging to the second category. Amandine Le Coz, between two sobs, herself agreed: “Today I’m on the road to recovery, but I’m not healed yet.”
Wrapped up in a long gray vest, the young woman with long brown hair and sometimes dull gaze has the complexion of a convalescent. A paper handkerchief in hand, her face regularly distorted by tears, she participates with difficulty in the presentation at the run of her life. Raised in the Paris region in a modest family of three children, of whom she was the youngest, her adolescence was marked by difficulties at school. Dyslexic, she is oriented in the Segpa class, which welcomes students with lasting learning difficulties. “It hurt me a lot, I felt useless, incapable”, she whispers. To hear it, it is this complex which directed it towards the Moslem religion as of the sixth.
“In Islam, we are in an equal community, there is no need to know a text by heart. We do not need to have an IQ of 247 to enter this religion.”
Amandine Le Coz, accusedbefore the special assize court
Between a mother of Christian culture and an atheist father, Amandine Le Coz concealed this attraction during her college years, where she adopted a Gothic style, to “exist, shock”. At the vocational school, where she obtained a level CAP auxiliary of life, she meets a friend “with a bimbo look” and swaps her black clothes for more festive outfits. Quick to self-depreciate in court, “intimidated” by the questions and the chastened language of the magistrate Laurent Raviot, she says to herself “superficial” and unable to get her driver’s license, which she passed “five times”. As she enters adulthood, she alternates odd jobs, photos for modeling and drug parties. Again, to mimic his friends at the time: “I wanted to be normal, like them.”
“I wanted to find a surrogate family”
It was after believing she was overdosing that she took the decision, she says, to convert, like a “escape, a valuation”. “She wondered why she hadn’t died that day”, completes the expert psychologist heard at the bar. Considering oneself “miraculous”Amandine Le Coz will start doing internet research on the subject and “encounter the Islamist discourse”.
After the gothic and bimbo allure comes that of the veiled woman. “We realized that she had changed, she was a girl who was modeling, and overnight, she no longer wanted us to see her legs”testifies his father, a little man with white hair, who confesses to having “fear of this religion”. When his parents discover “things hidden in his room”they kick her out.
After the identity wandering, comes the wandering in general. In 2014, Amandine Le Coz lives on the right and on the left. The changeover takes place in a few months. According to her meetings in the real and virtual world, she converts in a mosque of Garges-lès-Gonesse (Val-d’Oise) and decides to leave for Syria to live under the authority of the Islamic State, then just self-proclaimed. To the president, who tries to understand the link between his conversion and his “interest in Syria”the accused repeatedly stammers that she was “in hate” due to “violence of rejection” from his family. “I wanted to find a surrogate family, a group to belong to”, she repeats. But she assures him, she was not “not in hatred of France”.
“I make choices based on people”
The follower of “reality show” and “social networks” gives in to the sirens of propaganda, which puts forward “fighters erected as heroes, described as victorious and very beautiful”, in the words of the DGSI investigator. Fascinated by the “beauty” of her romantic partners in general, according to the expert-psychologist, the 23-year-old young woman seeks to marry at all costs, sesame to be able to leave. After several attempts, she ends up falling on Yacine Rettoun, whom she marries via an application.
“His departure for Syria is not driven by an ideology, moral values, something very elaborate. Finally, it is very imaginary, supported by a very inconsistent speech.”
Psychologist Stéphanie Navasbefore the special assize court
The prosecution does not subscribe to this thesis. “When she goes to Syria, she doesn’t go just because she finds a handsome man, or because someone speaks better than another, but because she has drunk on extremely violent propaganda. “, pointed out the Advocate General during his requisitions. When she arrived in Syria in September 2014, the dreams were still there – “I will be able to live my religion, have a house with a swimming pool”, she says to her mother – but the sought-after beauty quickly flies away. Violence is everywhere: in the beatings of her husband, an Islamic State official close to Boubaker el Hakim, responsible for the attacks planned outside, in the abuses committed by the group, in the bombardments… But Amandine The Coz stays. At each opportunity to leave, she gives up.
“I think she thought I wasn’t ready to accept her religion yet,” suggests her mother. This woman with short hair and big glasses admits that she never told him otherwise. Their daughter admits since the box to have been mainly influenced by the speech of a jihadist on the spot: “If I didn’t want to leave, it was because I was afraid of the flames of hell and of being an unbeliever. What is dangerous in my personality is that I make choices according to the folks.”
After managing to divorce Yacine Rettoun – given for dead since the summer of 2017 – Amandine Le Coz remarried another Islamic State fighter, Haroun Belfilali, suspected of having been part of a kataba (a battalion) of snipers. Confused with regrets and expressing his “shame”the accused said “to hate oneself”. But she annoys the court by evading the details of her engagement on the spot. Driven by the elements of the case and the Advocate General’s questions, she admits that she wanted to “to explode” and to have “already worn” an explosive belt on site “to die as a martyr”. “I thought that was the best worship.”
“Today, she doesn’t want to hear about it anymore”
The birth of her son in March 2017 put an end, according to her, to “these deadly ideas” and consolidated her wish to leave. Fleeing the progression of the enemies of the Islamic State, she ended up surrendering to the Kurdish forces in May 2018. After being detained with her son in the camps of Al Roj then Ain Issa , she escaped from the latter before being arrested and handed over to the Turkish authorities.She was deported to France on December 9, 2019.
Three years later, she claims to have started to “learn to think” by itself since its passage to the District of prevention of the radicalization (QPR) of the prison of Rennes (Ile-et-Vilaine). And enjoins the president to leave him there after his conviction. “It’s a revelation for me, they helped me to reflect on my religion, to become aware of my actions”she says with an almost childish enthusiasm.
At the helm, his parents underline his progress: “She asked us to buy her some makeup stuff, she listens to music, she wished us Merry Christmas, birthdays.” The subject of “religion” remains taboo in the family. “Today, she is no longer radicalized, she no longer wants to hear about it, she wants to live with her child, to work”, wants to believe his father. Amandine Le Coz thinks “do an aesthetic CAP to become a makeup artist”. “Do you still believe in the flames of hell?”asks the president. “I will always believe it”replies Amandine Le Coz, who concedes: “I still have a lot of work to do, I’m not ready to go out.” The court ordered socio-judicial follow-up for seven years after his release from prison.