BAGHDAD,— Iraq, Six French nationals convicted of membership in Islamic State (IS/ISIS) were sentenced to life in prison by an Iraqi court on Tuesday.
A seventh French defendant received a 15-year prison sentence, a Reuters witness present at the hearing said.
The defendants were part of a group of 47 French Islamic State suspects moved from detention facilities in northeastern Syria to Iraq last year.
U.S. forces and Iraqi authorities coordinated the transfer under a broader relocation arrangement.
The judge said the convictions and sentences fell under Iraq’s counterterrorism law, which was applied in this case to joining Islamic State and spreading fear.
He said the court chose life imprisonment over the death penalty because the six defendants were young.
The seventh man, who is 23, was sentenced to 15 years, according to the Reuters witness.
Defense lawyer Abbas al-Maliki said the defendants would challenge the sentences before the Court of Cassation.
Proceedings against the French nationals began last month.
Islamic State captured extensive territory in Iraq and Syria in 2014. A U.S.-led coalition and local forces defeated the group’s territorial control in 2019, although some militants remained active after many were detained.
The United States said in January that transfers of Islamic State detainees from Syria to Iraq had begun.
The decision came amid security concerns over detention facilities in northeastern Syria, where Kurdish-led forces had lost control of parts of the region.
In March 2026, a French court handed a life sentence to an Islamic State-linked jihadist for crimes against Iraq’s Yazidi minority, in the first case of its kind tried in France.
(With files from Reuters)
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