Iraq: three new French jihadists sentenced to life imprisonment

Iraqi justice on Thursday sentenced three new French jihadists to life imprisonment for their membership in the Islamic State (IS) group, as part of the trial of 47 French radical Islamists transferred from Syria last year.

On Tuesday, six French people had already been sentenced to life imprisonment and a seventh to 15 years in prison, in the first verdicts of this trial which opened in September in Baghdad.

The 47 prisoners were transferred in 2025 from neighboring Syria, where ISIS took control of vast territories from 2014, before being defeated five years later. Kamel ben Mbarek, 42, Charly Sun, 32, and Amir Amine Dali Amar, 37, were found guilty “of the crime of belonging to the terrorist group Daesh (Arabic acronym for IS, Editor’s note) and of having contributed with members of the group to spreading terror,” according to an AFP journalist on site. All three were sentenced to life imprisonment, or 20 years in prison under Iraqi law.

The hearings are held in the presence of observers and officials from the French embassy in Baghdad, as well as relatives of the accused. On the other hand, the Parisian lawyers of around thirty of them, who were demanding a trial in France, announced at the beginning of October that they had been "banned" from entering Iraq for having denounced in the press at the start of the year "inhuman treatment" of incarcerated French people.

Iraqi prisons are overcrowded with ISIS suspects.

Iraqi lawyers were appointed in their place. Charly Sun was a member of an Islamic police unit of ISIS, which imposed a reign of terror in Iraq and Syria. Her sister Carole Sun, who left for Syria in July 2015 at the age of 18 with her brother one year older, was repatriated and sentenced in December 2025 to ten years in prison by a French court.

In the group of 47 French people on trial, there is Adrien Guihal, a veteran of the French jihad who notably claimed responsibility in the name of ISIS for the Nice attack, which left 86 dead on July 14, 2016. In 2019, the Iraqi courts sentenced 11 French jihadists to death, whose sentence was commuted, on appeal, to life imprisonment. Iraqi prisons, already crowded with IS suspects, have thousands of additional detainees since their transfer in early 2026 from Syria.

This transfer was carried out by the United States after the takeover by Syrian forces of areas controlled by the Kurds, spearhead of the fight against ISIS. Among these 5,700 people are at least five French nationals, some of whom were minors when their parents joined ISIS. At the beginning of September, the Iraqi justice system indicated that it had completed the interrogation of the detainees and that it would now be able to try them.