‘France’s most wanted female jihadist’ arrested by Kurdish forces in Syria
FRANCE’S most wanted female jihadist has been arrested by Kurdish forces in Syria and is currently being held in a refugee camp on the Turkey-Syria border, the French radio station RMC reported.The radical Islamist, the first woman to be listed on the US’ international terrorist ‘blacklist,’ has been “tortured” in custody, according to her mother.
The French interior ministry refused to comment on RMC’s report, but her arrest has since been confirmed by Khaled Issa, the Kurdish Syrian representative in France.
She was allegedly arrested in Chaddade, a town in the north-eastern Syrian province of Hasaka, in December.
The daughter of a gendarme from the northern French town of Brittany, Émilie König, 33, fled to Syria to join Islamic State (ISIS) in 2012, and quickly became the terrorist group’s most prominent female voice.
A hardline Salafist who converted to Islam at the age of 17 and changed her name to Samra, Mrs König was once quoted as saying that the niqab – an Islamic garment that covers everything but the eyes – was like a “second skin”.A top ISIS recruiter and propagandist, she appeared in several propaganda videos in which she called for armed jihad, and has also been accused of encouraging friends and family members to launch attacks on French soil.In September 2015, she became the first woman to be listed on the United States’ foreign terrorist ‘blacklist’. She has also been blacklisted by the UN.Mrs König’s 70-year-old mother, however, told the French daily Ouest-France that her daughter had been “tortured” while in Kurdish custody.
She said: “I spoke to Émilie last week. She’s being held in a Kurdish refugee camp, where she has been interrogated and tortured.”Her mother, who is raising Mrs König’s two eldest children (she had three more children with an ISIS militant after moving to Syria), said that her daughter wanted to return to France.“I have asked [foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian] to help bring her and her children home,” she said, before adding that her daughter had “repented” and no longer adhered to ISIS’ ideology.
