Trial of French IS returnee highlights a growing focus on the women who came back

Tahar Aouidate, known as Selma, appeared before the special court in Paris that tries terrorist cases, charged with participating in a terrorist criminal conspiracy over her involvement with the Islamic State (IS) between 2014 and 2020, as well as recruiting another person.

She is a revenante – the word used for a woman who travelled to Syria or Iraq to join terrorist organisations, including the IS, before returning to France.

Women accounted for nearly a third of the approximately 1,500 French nationals who travelled to the region, and proportionally more of them have returned to France.

According to the latest figures from the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office (PNAT), cited by Le Monde, 176 of the 395 adults who came back to France were women.

Of those, 56 have been convicted by the special court.

They are increasingly becoming the focus of the court's proceedings, with the principal terrorist attacks and attempted attacks having been tried. Of the 23 terrorism cases scheduled to be heard by the special court this year, 18 involve female returnees.

Children of French jihadists found in Syrian orphanage

Family radicalisation

In court, Tahar Aouidate described her family – even before its radicalisation – as “a cult”, with her brother, Fodil, as its guru. He exercised, she said, “absolute” authority over his eight sisters, with their mother's approval.

In late 2013, Fodil began pressuring her and others in the family to travel to Syria and join the IS. Between May and September of 2014, 23 family members did.

Tahar Aouidate's parents, six of her sisters, their husbands and children left their home in the northern French city of Roubaix and went to Syria – even with Fodil under surveillance, until his own departure in June 2014.

Fodil is now in prison in Iraq. In 2019, he was among 11 French nationals sentenced to death in Iraq for belonging to the IS. His death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Tahar Aouidate was married off by her brother to a Tunisian IS fighter and, like 86 percent of the 22 female returnees whose cases were heard by the special courts in 2026, she gave birth in Syria. Her two children, now aged nine and 11, are currently under the care of the French state.

She faces a sentence of up to 30 years in prison.