At 19 years old, Sarah Talib left her native France to join ISIS in Syria. More than a decade later, she’s on trial for participating in a terrorist criminal organization.
PARIS (CN) — On Wednesday at a Paris court for terrorism cases, Sarah Talib stood behind the glass barrier of a dock.
The 31-year-old Frenchwoman wore her long hair down over a black shirt and flowy zebra-print skirt; she liked to dress fashionably, she told the court, while answering questions about how she became radicalized. In 2014, when she was 19 years old, she traveled to Syria to join ISIS — now, Talib is charged with participating in a terrorist criminal organization.
“I started praying, I started going to the mosque, I started wearing the veil… and it was a crescendo,” she told the court on Wednesday evening.
Talib was born in the Paris region in 1995. Her father was a violent alcoholic; he was found dead in the Seine in 2008 with alcohol in his system. After switching schools in middle school, she was harassed for the way she dressed in heels and makeup.
In high school, she met a friend who convinced her to start wearing a veil. In the years that followed it was a “crescendo,” a word that she repeated multiple times, into radicalization. By the time she was 19, she was married and pregnant, and the couple began watching propaganda videos for ISIS.
“For me, what I saw around me, it was a search for identity, also the fact of being in a community, to be part of something,” Talib said on Wednesday. “There was self-esteem.”
The couple traveled to Turkey in 2014, when smugglers brought them into Syria. On Wednesday, the court didn’t question Talib’s time there, which will likely be addressed during hearings on Thursday.
She was arrested in Turkey in 2021.
Women walk in the al-Hol camp that houses some 60,000 refugees, including families and supporters of the Islamic State group, many of them foreign nationals, in Hasakeh province, Syria, on May 1, 2021. (AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad, File)
Experts explained the role of women in terrorist organizations has often been misunderstood. Xavier Crettiez, a political science professor at Sciences Po Saint-Germain-en-Laye specialized in radicalization and political violence, said that from a somewhat “doctrinal standpoint,” Al-Qaeda and ISIS stipulated that women were not supposed to participate in armed combat; the role of the women was to “support the fighters, satisfy the fighters’ sexual urges,” or “bear children to feed [the ranks of] the caliphate.”
Since women were sort of a “blind spot” for state security services, Crettiez said many started to become more active in the organizations.
Gender bias has influenced the general perception of why women take on these roles, according to Crettiez. He explained that for a very long time, one of the dominant theories was that women were violent not because they were jihadists, but because they were manipulated by their husbands.
“But people didn’t really think about women’s agency, or rather the fact that women could decide on their own to join the armed struggle,” he said. “It’s true that this logic of ‘influenced by’ also corresponds to a form of anti-intellectualization of women, as if, in the end, women didn’t join the armed struggle through ideological attraction or because they are convinced of the need to do so, but purely out of emotion — it goes back to a kind of idea that women are driven by emotions while men are driven by reason.”
On Wednesday, the judge said that when the court examined a personality expert’s report, it “had the impression that there wasn’t a choice” for Talib to go to Syria. When she asked if she was mistaken, the expert couldn’t deliver a yes or no answer.
Joana Cook, an assistant professor of terrorism and political violence at Leiden University’s Institute of Security and Global Affairs, said courts traditionally overlooked women as terrorist actors until the establishment of ISIS. Under the caliphate, women took on roles ranging from healthcare workers to suicide bombers and militants. But there are still differences in how these women are charged.
“One useful example to illustrate this is the number of charges related to child endangerment or other offences related to their children that women have been charged with in certain countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Finland; I’m not aware of male returnees facing similar charges,” she said. “However, this may be partially explained by the fact that so many males were killed on the battlefield, or are still in prison in Iraq, and have not returned yet to face charges, but would be a useful trend to watch as they return from Iraq.”
The trial is set to run through Friday.
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