An “unusual determination” and a repentance which it is permissible to doubt. The special assize court sentenced this Wednesday to 12 years of criminal imprisonment a “ghost” of the Islamic State (IS) group, tried in Paris for two stays in Syria between 2013 and 2017. After nearly five hours of deliberation, the magistrates have combined this sentence with a security period of two thirds.
The National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat) had requested fourteen years’ imprisonment, including two thirds of security, against the 32-year-old accused. Advocate General Alexa Dubourg had underlined the “concealment capacities” of the accused and her sometimes “incoherent” attitude.
At the start of his trial on Monday, Douha Mounib, 32, adopted a posture of repentance, claiming to have “changed” since his express radicalization at the end of 2012 and his “desire” which had turned into “obsession” to leave for France. Syria. On the third and last day of the hearing, the Advocate General said she was unable to comment on the “sincerity” of this repentance. “I will not take the bet to believe her,” she asserted.
In her indictment of just over an hour, the magistrate cited as an example the incredible escape attempt by Douha Mounib on November 14, 2021, when she had been incarcerated for four years in the remand center of Fresnes and that she was already making “speeches about her desire to integrate into France”. If the court is not seized of this separate procedure, it hovered over the debates as this attempt to escape questions the degree of danger of the accused.
“Very watered down” version of the facts
Her long loose brown hair, her legs crossed and her face resting on her hand, Douha Mounib did not miss a crumb of the prosecution’s requisitions in the box, raising her eyebrows from time to time. The young woman recognizes “the totality” of the facts with which she is accused. She explained it at length and with a certain frankness, providing many details on her radicalization and her career, much less on her second Syrian stay of fifteen months.
If “we can have the feeling that we are facing someone who is very cooperative”, Douha Mounib “gives us a very watered down version of the facts”, “minimizes” them, considered the general counsel. At the end of 2013, the accused had left her third year of midwifery school in the south-east of France to go to Syria for the first time, after a journey from Morocco to Turkey where she had married a smuggler whom she had just met.
After this first stay of two months cut short due to the instability of the region, Douha Mounib had never stopped wanting to rejoin this war zone, but had been turned back by the Turks at each of his attempts. Her “extreme determination” to want to join IS ended up paying off in the summer of 2015: thanks to the identity card stolen from her mother, she managed to cross the Turkish-Syrian border with her second Tunisian husband and the son of the latter, aged less than 2 years.
“Completely inaudible speech”
Regarding this second stay, in Mosul (Iraq) then Raqqa (Syria), two cities under the jihadist yoke, Douha Mounib “does not tell the truth”, hammered the representative of the prosecution. The magistrate does not believe either in the fact that the husband of the accused remained more than fifteen months without “never fighting” for an organization which “ordered to fight”, nor that she herself saw nothing of the “atrocities committed” by IS, and that she was able to practice as a midwife – a “valuable skill” – “in a clandestine manner” as she puts it.
“It is quite daring” that Douha Mounib comes to affirm it, and for the Advocate General, this demonstrates a “totally inaudible and indefensible level of speech”.
Douha Mounib had left the territories controlled by the Islamic State group at the end of 2016. Before the court, she justified this departure by her “anger” at the “injustices on the spot”. The Advocate General advanced the “significant setbacks” suffered by IS at the time. Douha Mounib was arrested by Turkish authorities in March 2017 as she crossed the border with her months-old daughter and son-in-law. After nine months in a detention center in Turkey, she was repatriated to France and imprisoned.