On 15 January 2015, a fourteen-year-old girl from a small town in central-western France told her family she was going to school, left her home, and vanished without a trace.
Less than three weeks later, as she approached her fifteenth birthday, she was already in Raqqa, Syria, married to a member of Islamic State (IS).
Her radicalisation had been rapid: months spent watching IS propaganda videos through sleepless nights, and online conversations with jihadists explaining how to join them, had convinced her to leave everything behind.
Seven years would pass before she would see her homeland again.
Repatriated in July 2022, she returned to France with fifteen other women and thirty-five children, all of them so-called 'returnees' from IS territory. Imprisonment awaited her.
Of the approximately 420 women who left France to join the self-declared IS 'caliphate' in Syria and Iraq, she is among the youngest – perhaps the very youngest.
As a consequence of her teenage involvement with IS, the Paris Special Assize Court sentenced her on 10 July to five years in prison, one year suspended.
Now a mother to two children, aged eight and nine, both born in Syria, she will not return to prison, having completed her custodial sentence at the end of 2024 after a deradicalisation process acknowledged by the prison authorities.
According to the court's reasoning, which AFP reviewed, her "ideological commitment" began with her radicalisation at school in September 2014 and lasted until her arrest in February 2019 in Baghouz, the last IS stronghold.
The court found that by spending more than four years in IS-controlled areas and spreading their propaganda, she "contributed to the strength and resilience of this terrorist organisation."
However, the court also highlighted her "very young age." Unlike the investigators, the judges did not consider her marriage to Steve Duarte – an IS member thirteen years her senior and of Portuguese-Luxembourgish nationality – as grounds for the charge of association with a terrorist group.
Her lawyer, Marie Dosé, expressed outrage: "How could counter-terrorism investigators ever have considered that this marriage was not forced? At fourteen, she consented to nothing."
After running away, the teenager travelled by train to Belgium, bought a plane ticket with a stolen bank card, and flew to Istanbul.
A smuggler took her and a group of Swedish women into Syria, where she was brought to a house. Steve Duarte arrived on 2 February. That same day, she was married in a religious ceremony to a man she had never met.
Steve Duarte remains in detention in Syria. Last year, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Luxembourg. Duarte is no ordinary IS recruit: Western intelligence services believe the convert was both a propagandist and an executioner for IS.
He is thought to be the jihadist filmed executing a prisoner in 2016. The family was swept from city to city – Raqqa, Aleppo, Mosul – following IS advances and retreats, and as Duarte's fortunes within the group shifted.
In 2018, their home in Mosul was bombed. During this period, the teenager gave birth to her children in 2016 and 2017, and reportedly encountered several high-profile French jihadists.
She had joined IS just a week after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks in Paris, and admits she was driven by radical ideology.
After her arrest, she spent three years behind barbed wire in the Al-Hol and Roj camps in Syria with her children.
Yet her defence team questions how a schoolgirl, whose rapid descent into radicalisation had been reported by friends and the school principal, was able to leave the European Union so easily – even though her father had immediately alerted police to her disappearance and plans to travel to Syria.
"No social worker ever intervened in her family despite the teenager's lightning-fast radicalisation," said her lawyer, adding that the girl was "swept away at fourteen by the hatred of social networks and IS propaganda."
Having earned business qualifications in detention, the young woman now works for a prestigious brand and dreams of becoming a lawyer – her childhood ambition.
She intends to take part in anti-radicalisation campaigns, hopes to learn to swim, and is determined to "make up for lost time," according to her lawyer.
Each weekend, she sees her children – now in care since their return to France – with whom she used to listen to songs by Slimane while in the camps.
Family experts describe her as intelligent but immature, angry with her parents, and confined within a family "straitjacket" that, while free from violence, showed little affection, and where, as the eldest of four, she was responsible for looking after her siblings.
This was the teenager who once convinced herself that God forbade her from listening to music – a childhood interrupted by extremism and violence, now seeking a chance to rebuild.
