Carole Sun was convicted at the end of a three-day trial by the special assize court in Paris. The sentence includes five years of supervision after her release and a court-ordered requirement for medical treatment, judicial sources said.
Sun left France for Syria in July 2014 when she was 18, travelling with her older brother. She was arrested in December 2017 by Kurdish forces while fleeing along the Euphrates River during the collapse of the Islamic State group, the court heard.
The convoy included several well-known female jihadists, including Emilie König, a notorious recruiter and the first woman to be put on the US’s international terrorist blacklist.
France’s domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI, viewed the movement as an attempt by the Islamic State to relocate members into remaining pockets of territory, including the Idlib area.
Sun returned to France on 5 July 2022 during the first large-scale repatriation of children and their mothers since the fall of the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate in 2019.
Now aged 30, she told the court she had become radicalized on social media and described her departure as a way of “patching up” personal trauma, including a gang rape when she was 14.
During the trial, the presiding judge said Sun lived with or associated with “highly publicized individuals” who were “known for extremely cruel abuses” or who fought in units that later included attackers involved in the 13 November 2015 Paris attacks.
Among them was Salaheddine Guitone, a French Islamic State propagandist she had met on Facebook. She married him soon after arriving in Syria, the court heard. The marriage lasted about 10 days before he was killed in combat.
Judges also referred to her brother, Charly Sun, now imprisoned in Iraq. He was part of an Islamic police unit led by Salim Benghalem, a French jihadist identified in court as a hostage jailer.
In a later marriage, Sun wed a member of the Amniyat, the group’s intelligence service. She wrote to her mother that the man “kills traitors”, the court heard. He is also imprisoned in Iraq.
Questioned about a photograph showing her baby with a semi-automatic pistol on his lap, Sun said she could not explain it. “I was inside the ideology, and it stopped me from seeing that it was serious,” she said.
Sun admitted she was not shocked when her brother described violent acts. “I didn’t think it would be so hard to see,” she said.
After hours of questioning, Sun added: “The truth was the Islamic State, and I closed my eyes to the abuses.” She also acknowledged that she had adopted the group’s codes and helped spread its propaganda, the court heard.
Sun told the court she spent more than four years with her two children in Syrian camps holding displaced people and suspected jihadists. Beyond extreme heat, illness and poverty, the hardest part was “the population, which is frightening”, she said.
“It’s like a jungle, a hell full of rumours, fear and very extreme women,” she said. Several French women testified that Sun remained supportive of the Islamic State, which she denied.
The prosecutor, who sought a 12-year sentence, said public order concerns were compounded by the number of women still awaiting trial.
Around 60 French women who travelled to the Iraq-Syria zone are yet to be tried. Of more than 1,500 French people who left for the region, 160 women have returned to France, and 30 have been tried since 2017, judicial figures said.
