Former French jihadist Jonathan Geffroy (41) was sentenced on Friday to 18 years in prison by the Paris Special Assise Court for his involvement with the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group from 2015 to 2017.
Geffroy, who claims to be a reformed man, received the same sentence that he had been given by a lower court. His Moroccan wife, Latifa Chadli, was also tried; she was sentenced to five years in prison, three of them suspended.
Originally from the southwestern town of Toulouse, Geffroy had converted to Islam and quickly became radicalised through contact with prospective jihadists like Quentin Lebrun and Chahid Tahiri. In February 2015, he travelled with his wife and their three-month-old child to Syria.
Both Geffroy and Chadli stood trial on charges of terrorist association and “moral and material abandonment of a minor.” In his defence, Geffroy maintained that he had travelled to the Iraq-Syria region to “do humanitarian work” and become an “ambulance driver.”
However, this was not entirely true. Geffroy served within the ranks of the Anwar al-Awlaki Brigade, an ISIS detachment that included dozens of French nationals such as brothers Jean-Michel and Fabien Clain, responsible for the ISIS-claimed terror attacks in France on 13 November 2015.
Geffroy also fought in Iraq with the elite Tariq Ibn Zyad Brigade. In November 2016, as things became harder for ISIS on the battlefield, he reached out to French security services for assistance. He was eventually captured by the Free Syrian Army in early 2017 while trying to escape from Syria.
Geffroy, Chadli, and their two children were handed over to French authorities in September 2017. During the investigations, Geffroy became cooperative and went as far as to disclose that ISIS had plans to send child soldiers to Europe.
