Prosecuted three times for having joined a jihadist organization in Syria through a British network, the 34-year-old Frenchwoman, Farrah Zerari, was sentenced to nine years in prison by the specially composed criminal court of Paris, the National Prosecutor’s Office reported. Anti-terrorist. (PNAT) to Agence France-Presse (AFP), Saturday, September 28.
Farrah Zerari was on trial for participation in a terrorist conspiracy. His name emerged in May 2017 during an administrative investigation in France. She was arrested in January 2021, almost two years after her return to France.
She becomes the twentieth woman convicted in France since 2012 for joining a terrorist organization, according to the attorney general, who had requested eleven years in prison with a two-thirds security period.
His trial, on Thursday and Friday, allowed us to trace his path: his childhood in the Lyon region, marked by tensions with his mother and the divorce of his parents, the beginning of adolescence and his isolation after his departure to London with his father. , hairdresser.
It was the early 2000s and in the British capital, then nicknamed “Londonistan”, some 850 individuals from the radical Islamist movement left for the Iraqi-Syrian area. Farrah Zerari, barely an adult and fresh out of rehab, with no diploma, turns to strict Islam. Between 2013 and 2021, she settled successively in Türkiye, Dubai and Qatar, and made three stays in Syria, accompanied by stops in France, where she had two children.
“I didn’t hear the war”
She decides to marry religiously, by phone, with a stranger she met online: Choukri Ellekhlifi, whom she met in 2013 in Atma, a town near the Turkish border and defeated by the conflicts between two jihadist groups that have become rivals, the Al-Front. Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which became the Islamic State.
He claims to have discovered right away that Choukri Ellekhlifi was a soldier, but « pr[is] like him [était] ». He died a few days later. According to the British press, he belongs to the Al-Nusra Front and worked alongside Mohammed Emwasi, a figure in the group of jailers and hostage executioners called “Beatles”.
As for her second husband, Youssef Hassouni, whom she married four months later, “he makes war”the accused snapped, swearing not to know which faction he belonged to. It would be Daesh (Arabic acronym for IS), according to British authorities.
French investigators establish that the defendants learned online about women’s participation in jihad and martyrdom. A video shows her wearing a niqab (full veil that covers the face except the eyes), firing a Kalashnikov.
At the trial, with a long ponytail and jeans, he hides the fights. “I didn’t hear the war”she said. “At one point in my life I became radicalized”recognizes, but without “never having joined” to jihadist ideology.
