The first judgments have come in for a group of French jihadist suspects who were moved out of Syria last year, and they are heavy. A criminal court in Baghdad’s Karkh district on Tuesday jailed six of the men for life and gave a seventh 15 years, convicting all of them under Iraq’s counter-terrorism law of joining Islamic State and spreading fear.
Iraq can impose capital punishment for such crimes, but it chose not to here. According to a Reuters reporter present in court, Judge Mohammed Salman told the room that the youth of the defendants had tipped the balance toward life imprisonment, which under Iraqi law can mean up to 20 years behind bars. The man who received the shorter sentence had been taken to IS-held Syria by his mother more than ten years ago, when he was still a child.
All seven belong to a larger cohort of 47 French citizens handed to Baghdad from camps and prisons in north-eastern Syria. US troops arranged that relocation with Iraqi officials after Kurdish-led forces lost their grip on parts of the area, raising fears about who would guard the detainees. Their hearings only opened last month, so dozens of cases are still pending.
Defence lawyer Abbas al-Maliki said the convicted men would challenge the rulings at the Court of Cassation. The outcome puts Paris in an awkward spot, since France opposes the death penalty everywhere but has shown little appetite for bringing its IS fighters home to stand trial.
At its peak in 2014 the group ruled a huge stretch of territory straddling the Iraqi-Syrian border; five years later a US-led coalition and its local partners had destroyed that self-declared state. Sleeper cells have survived, and the courts are still working through the human wreckage the group left behind.
