Baghdad's Karkh Criminal Court sentenced six French men to life in prison on Tuesday and a seventh to 15 years, convicting them of joining the Islamic State — the first verdicts in the trial of 47 French suspects who were transferred from detention in Syria to Iraq in a move coordinated by the United States. The men were convicted under Iraq's counterterrorism law of belonging to the group and of helping it to spread terror, at the end of a trial that opened in September.
The presiding judge told the defendants that the evidence against them, and their own acknowledgement of membership in the group, was enough to have condemned them to death. Instead, the court commuted the punishment to life imprisonment — a term that means 20 years under Iraqi law. "Given that you are young," the judge told them, the court wanted to offer them the chance, in the future, "to straighten the course of your life." Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council, announcing the verdicts, described the seven as extremely dangerous, saying their activities had threatened Iraq's security, destabilised Iraq and Syria, and incited terrorist operations in other countries.
The seventh defendant received 15 years. He had been taken to Syria by his mother as a child, more than a decade ago, after she travelled there to join the Islamic State, and he grew up inside the group's territory. His French lawyer has accused Paris of accepting "that this fate be reserved for children who have since grown up, who are in no way responsible for their parents' choices."
The seven are the first to be sentenced from a group of 47 French nationals who travelled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State between 2012 and 2015. When the group's self-declared caliphate collapsed in 2019, they were captured by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and spent the years since held in prisons and camps in north-east Syria. In 2025 they were transferred to Iraq under a security arrangement supervised by the U.S. military, and held in Iraqi custody to face trial. Among the 47 still waiting for their own hearings is Adrien Guihal, a veteran of the French jihadist scene, who claimed responsibility in the Islamic State's name for the 2016 truck attack in Nice that killed 86 people.
The French transfer was an early case of a policy America later carried out at far greater scale. In January this year, after Syrian government forces advanced into the north-east and Kurdish-led guards lost control of parts of the detention system — with around 200 detainees escaping from one prison before many were recaptured — U.S. Central Command launched a mission to move the detainees into Iraqi custody. "Facilitating the orderly and secure transfer of ISIS detainees is critical to preventing a breakout that would pose a direct threat to the United States and regional security," its commander, Admiral Brad Cooper, said at the launch. Over 23 days, U.S. forces transported more than 5,700 adult male detainees of 61 nationalities from Syria to Iraq. Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised Iraq for taking them and urged other countries to take responsibility for their own citizens and bring them home to face justice.
The verdicts are not the end of the case. An Iraqi lawyer for the men, Abbas al-Maliki, said they will appeal to Iraq's Court of Cassation; the defendants have 30 days to challenge the judgments, which also undergo review under Iraqi law. The men's French lawyers were not in the courtroom: lawyers in Paris representing about thirty of the 47 learned this month that they had been banned from Iraqi territory, after denouncing what they called the inhumane treatment of the detainees and the transfer itself. Iraqi lawyers defended the men instead, while officials from the French embassy in Baghdad attended the hearings. Matthieu Bagard, the French lawyer for four of the seven, called the sentences "a form of relief, above all for the families, because the death penalty was legitimately feared" — but said it changed nothing about "Frenchmen judged without a fair trial," pointing to allegations of torture and forced confessions. Human rights organisations have long criticised Iraq's terrorism trials as rushed and short on safeguards.
France has refused, as a matter of policy, to bring home adults who left to join the Islamic State, insisting they be tried where their crimes were committed. Paris opposes the death penalty everywhere and sent embassy officials to monitor the trial, but no statement from the French government on Tuesday's verdicts had been reported. The outcome is markedly different from the last time French jihadists stood in a Baghdad dock: in 2019 an Iraqi court sentenced 11 Frenchmen to death, and those sentences were commuted on appeal to life imprisonment. This time, the court imposed life at the first verdict.
Behind the legal argument are the people the Islamic State hurt. The group's victims in Iraq and Syria number in the hundreds of thousands — among them the Yazidi minority, whose men were murdered in their thousands and whose women and girls were enslaved after the 2014 assault on Sinjar, crimes United Nations investigators have called genocide. France carries its own open wounds: the 2016 Nice attack, claimed for the group by a man who sits among the 47, killed 86 people on a Bastille Day promenade. For families on every side, Tuesday's verdicts settle something the desert camps never could. After years in which captured fighters sat in prisons with no charge and no end date, a court has now heard a case and given an answer — guilty, and decades in prison — while the trials of the remaining 40 French suspects continue, and Western governments decide, man by man, whether their captured fighters face judges or are left in camps indefinitely.
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