BAGHDAD: An Iraqi court on Sunday sentenced three French citizens to death for joining the militant Islamic State group, the first IS members from France to be handed capital punishment, a court official said.

Captured in Syria by a US-backed force fighting the militants, Kevin Gonot, Leonard Lopez and Salim Machou were transferred to Iraq for trial. They have 30 days to appeal.

Iraq has taken custody of thousands of militants repatriated in recent months from neighbouring Syria, where they were caught by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces during the battle to destroy the IS “caliphate”.

The Iraqi judiciary said earlier in May that it has tried and sentenced more than 500 suspected foreign members of IS since the start of last year.

Its courts have condemned many to life in prison and others to death, although no foreign IS members have yet been executed.

The trials have been criticised by human rights groups, which say they often rely on evidence obtained through torture.

They have also raised the question of whether suspected IS jihadists should be tried in the region or repatriated to their countries of origin, in the face of strong public opposition.

Those sentenced on Sunday were among 13 French nationals caught in battle-scarred eastern Syria and handed to Iraqi authorities in February on suspicion of being members of IS’s feared contingent of foreign fighters.

One was later released as it was found he had travelled to Syria to support the Yazidi religious minority — the target of a particularly brutal IS campaign that rights groups say may have amounted to genocide.

The remaining 12 were put on trial under Iraq’s counterterrorism law, which can dole out the death penalty to anyone found guilty of joining a “terrorist” group, even if they were not explicitly fighting.

Trials criticised

Gonot, who fought for IS before being arrested in Syria with his mother, wife, and half-brother, has also been sentenced in absentia by a French court to nine years in prison, according to French research group the Centre for the Analysis of Terrorism.

Machou was a member of the Tariq ibn Ziyad brigade, “a European foreign terrorist fighter cell” that carried out attacks in Iraq and Syria and planned others in Paris and Brussels, according to US officials.

Lopez, from Paris, travelled with his wife and two children to IS-held Mosul in northern Iraq before entering Syria, French investigators say.

His lawyer, Nabil Boudi, condemned the trial as “summary justice”.

The French government had “guaranteed us that French citizens would all be entitled to a fair trial, even in Iraq,” he said.

But Lopez had been sentenced to death “based solely on a series of interrogations in Baghdad jails”, he said.

Iraq declared victory over IS in late 2017 and began trying foreigners accused of joining the jihadists the following year.

Rights groups including Human Rights Watch have criticised Iraq’s anti-terror trials, which they say often rely on circumstantial evidence or confessions obtained under torture.

Published in Dawn, May 27th, 2019