After the hell of the Islamic State organization and the Syrian camps, Sana, 24 years old, two children, threatened with expulsion by France

2023-09-08 05:30:09
Sana, photographed in Paris, September 3, 2023. OLGA KRAVETS FOR “LE MONDE”

Sana is the first name she chose, as she cannot change her last name at the moment. In the meantime, she wishes to remain anonymous. Sana, therefore, no longer wants to have anything to do with her family or with her past, but regularly, both catch up with her. As she tries to rebuild herself after nearly a decade living in the shadow of jihad, she is now threatened with expulsion – for “threat to public order” according to the prefecture – towards Algeria, a country that she does not know and where she has never set foot.

Healthy, what The world met, was born in the north of France. She is now 24 years old. According to her account, at age 13, her mother, radicalized and violent, forcibly veiled her and removed her from school. She also refused to complete her application for French nationality. At 15, she took her with her three brothers – the youngest of whom was 3 at the time – and her sister to Syria, without asking her opinion. Once there, Sana was forcibly married to a Belgian Daesh fighter. She had two children from him, two little girls who are now 5 and 7 years old.

With the fall of Baghouz, the last bastion of the pseudo-caliphate of the Islamic State (IS) organization, in March 2019, Sana surrendered to Kurdish forces, who interned her in a camp with the other foreign prisoners and their children. She spent nearly four years there in appalling hygienic and unsanitary conditions. The children do not receive an education, even if their mother tries to brighten up their daily lives with games, the trio lives under the thumb of a matriarch who is always fanaticized, according to her. His father died in the area, as did two babies that his mother gave birth there. Sana does not know what happened to her husband but does not want to find him.

Questioned for four days by the DGSI

Unbeknownst to her mother, Sana requests her repatriation through her lawyer, Mᵉ Marie Dosé. She ended up being taken away by French authorities with her two daughters on January 24. When she landed in Villacoublay (Yvelines), she was separated from her children. “All our time in the camp, I had been preparing them for this moment, she says. But, even though I knew what was going to happen, it broke my heart to see my two little ones leave in the arms of educators. » During this time, she was questioned for four days by the DGSI, the police and internal intelligence service responsible for the fight against terrorism. At the end of this custody, the anti-terrorism investigating judge decides to let her go free and not to prosecute her.

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