Testimony “Being judged is better than the situation we are in,” confides a former senior Moroccan Daesh official before the Kurdish autonomous justice system

In Syria, due to the lack of repatriation from their country of origin, some 12,000 imprisoned jihadists will be tried by the autonomous Kurdish courts. Mohammed Bergich is one of them.

In 2014, the Daesh organization proclaimed a caliphate in Syria and Iraq. The terrorist group then attracted thousands of fighters into its ranks, sometimes from abroad. Ten years later, 12,000 foreign jihadists are imprisoned in Syria. Their countries of origin refuse to repatriate them. They have therefore still not been judged. This is too much for the Kurds of Syria. Their autonomous administration has announced that it wants to judge them themselves.

Among them is Mohammed Bergich. The Moroccan jihadist, with salt and pepper hair, who joined Daesh in 2013, arrives escorted, blindfolded and handcuffed in the offices of the Kurdish secret services. Considered one of the propagandists of the Islamic State, he has been a prisoner since the fall of the caliphate in Baghouz, Syria, in 2019.

Cut off from the world for months, he discovered that the Kurds wanted to judge him during his interview with franceinfo. A judgment which, according to Mohammed Bergich, “does not apply with Islamic Sharia law”.

“For us, these are judgments that are not legitimate. Asking for a judgment is disbelief in our religion.”he retorts. Before continuing: “But, overall, being judged is better than the situation we are in, where we have no information, no visits… I was a senior Daesh official. It doesn’t bother me if I am judged and sentenced to 20, 25 years, life imprisonment, it doesn’t bother me. It’s my path,” he explains.

The man also explains, speaking to franceinfo, that he has no resentment towards his country of origin, Morocco, which did not repatriate him. “The day I left my country, I had no intention of returning. I left without obtaining authorization from Mohamed VI”he says, although requests for repatriations have been made for five years by the local authorities and all remained unanswered.

This is also what led the Kurds of Syria to want to judge these foreign jihadists themselves. “We have laws and courts to fight terrorism, insists Fana Al-Gayyat, head of diplomacy for North-East Syria. They are just starting to prepare these files. Some cases have already been submitted to local courts, which have their own management method. Our goal is to punish these criminals and above all to provide justice to the victims.” he explains. The death penalty has been abolished in northeastern Syria. So sentences go up to life imprisonment.