The key facts
- Three French nationals sentenced to life imprisonment by the Karkh court in Baghdad; ten of 47 French nationals have been convicted this week in the mass trial
- On Tuesday six received life sentences and one 15 years; life imprisonment in Iraq equals 20 years with automatic review within 30 days
- The defendants testified about their path to ISIS; the court challenged their accounts with intelligence data and the organisation's card index
New verdicts in the mass trial
An Iraqi court on Thursday sentenced three more French nationals to life imprisonment for membership of ISIS, bringing the number of French nationals convicted this week to ten. The verdicts were handed down by the Karkh Criminal Court in Baghdad under Iraq's anti-terrorism legislation, The National reports. Under Iraqi law, life imprisonment is equivalent to 20 years of imprisonment and is subject to automatic review by the Court of Cassation within 30 days.
Scale of the trial and previous verdicts
The new verdicts followed a decision by the same court on Tuesday, when seven other French nationals were convicted — the first rulings in a mass trial of 47 French citizens, transferred from north-eastern Syria to Iraq in July 2025. On Tuesday, six of the defendants received life sentences, while the seventh was sentenced to 15 years. The hearings were presided over by Judge Mohammed Salman, who, according to the report, told each defendant that the evidence was sufficient for a guilty verdict, but that, given the defendant's youth, he had decided to give him a chance to reform, even though the charge carries the death penalty. Court-appointed defence lawyers and representatives of the French embassy attended the hearings.
Defendants' testimony and the court's position
Among those sentenced on Thursday was 32-year-old Charly San Raymond of Vietnamese origin, known in ISIS as Abu Sufyan al-Faransi. He claimed that he had not intended to travel to Syria, but had gone to Turkey on holiday at the invitation of his sister, who had converted to Islam in Paris in 2011; according to him, he agreed to cross the border only to accompany his sister, but ISIS militants persuaded him to stay. He completed a two-week Sharia course in Arabic, a language he did not understand, swore allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and then served in the Islamic police and the Diwan al-Jund at military posts near Raqqa. Judge Salman challenged his account: he stated that Raymond had taken part in fighting in Baghuz in 2019 and had been wounded, and that extremist material had been found on the defendant's phone in France. The court also noted that the ISIS card index identified him as a 'mujahid'. At the end of the hearing, Raymond admitted his guilt and said: 'I repent'. The second convicted man, 42-year-old Kamal Habib Ahmed bin Mubarak, linked his path to Syria to the Arab Spring and the abuses of the Syrian regime; in Syria he served in the internal police, which detained ISIS members for bribery and corruption. He renounced the organisation and apologised to the victims and their families.
