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Three French women including a niece of notorious jihadist propagandists went on trial on Monday, accused of travelling to the Middle East to join the Islamic State group and taking their eight children with them.One of the women is Jennyfer Clain, a 34-year-old niece of Jean-Michel and Fabien Clain, who claimed responsibility on behalf of IS for the attacks on November 13, 2015, when 130 people died at the Bataclan concert hall and elsewhere in shootings that traumatised France.The Clain brothers are presumed dead. In 2022, they were sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment without parole.The two other women on trial are Jennyfer Clain’s sister-in-law, Mayalen Duhart, 42, and 67-year-old Christine Allain, the women’s mother-in-law.Each of them faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted.Duhart is the only one of the three who is appearing in court as a free woman, saying she is now working at a bakery.The defendants are being tried by a special criminal court in Paris that is sitting without a jury – standard practice in terrorism cases.The women had travelled to Raqqa, the Islamic State group’s onetime capital, with their children in 2014. After the 2017 battle for Raqqa, which marked the IS group’s defeat, the women spent two years with its retreating forces before trying to enter Turkey. Turkish authorities detained the three women in 2019 as they attempted to enter from Syria with nine children between ages 3 and 13. Eight of the children had been born in France.The women were then expelled to France, where they were charged with criminal association with a terrorist enterprise.Clain and Duhart are also being prosecuted for failing to fulfil their parental obligations, notably for voluntarily taking their eight children “to a war zone to join a terrorist group,” the indictment said, exposing them to “significant risk of physical and psychological harm”.In their decision to refer the three women to a criminal court, the investigating judges noted that they “remained for a long period of time” within jihadist groups.”It was with full knowledge of the facts” that Allain and her two daughters-in-law chose to join the Islamic State group in Syria after the caliphate was established, according to the investigating magistrates’ indictment seen by AFP.Allain’s lawyer said she had worked hard to turn her life around.”She still considers herself a Muslim, but she has only known one interpretation of Islam, the wrong one,” he said.”She hates the person she had become.” The trial is scheduled to last until September 26.
