Sahra Ali Mehenni
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Sahra Ali Mehenni is a French Muslim woman who, at age 17, left her home in Lézignan-Corbières and traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in 2014.[1] She was one of the most youngest French people known to have joined ISIL. In 2019, Sahra was repatriated to France.[2]
Sahra is one of five children in a middle-class home in a small town near Narbonne,[3] and shared a bedroom with her younger sister.[4] Her father, an industrial chemist,[5] is an Algerian Muslim born in France,[3] and her mother a French-born Catholic.[1] Her father did not attend mosque,[3] and although the family observed Ramadan, they did not follow the Ramadan fasting rules closely.[6] Sahra's mother never embraced Islam and described herself as an atheist, and she and her husband had raised their children areligiously.[3]
Sahra formally converted to Islam a year and a half before her disappearance.[7] She began to pray regularly, eventually five times a day. She ordered a jilbab through the mail and began to wear it,[8] and dropped out of school for six months, causing tension in her family.[4] Her mother disapproved of her choice to wear the veil, and Sahra called her an "infidel" who was "impure" and had no right to judge her choices. Her family forbid her to leave the house in her jilbab, afraid she'd be subject to Islamaphobic attacks.[3]
She spent a lot of time online, spending hours at a time on the computer. Her computer was in her bedroom,[9] and her family didn't pay attention to her internet activity.[6] She told her family she was talking to a boy online who was also a convert to Islam. She also spoke about news reports of the Syrian Civil War and said she would like to do humanitarian work there, but that "those young people who left to fight jihad had lost their minds."[7]
By the time she disappeared, Sahra had enrolled in a new school. Shortly before her disappearance, she asked her mother for her passport, saying she wanted to get her paperwork in order as she would soon be an adult.[4]
On March 11, 2014, she told her father she was taking some extra clothing to school to show her friends to wear the veil.[10] Her father dropped her off at the train station as he normally did so she could go to school. Instead she took a train to the airport in Marseille, flew to Istanbul, and crossed the border into Syria.[1] It was the first time she had ever ridden an airplane.[4]
Sahra called her mother over lunchtime that day and claimed to be eating with friends; she was in fact in Marseille about to board her flight to Turkey.[4] Her family did not realize anything was amiss until just before dinner, when Sahra wasn't at the train station when her father came to pick her up.[10] The next day, they noticed her passport was missing.[4] The family contacted the police, who opened a criminal investigation and seized Sahra's computer.[7]
After arrival in Syria
Three days after her departure from France, Sahra called her family and said she was fine, but refused to tell them where she was because "it wouldn't change anything." She contacted her older brother over Facebook and said she was in a village near Aleppo. She described her location as "very calm. In fact, it's like France, like home. Except the niqab is mandatory, it's so great. And we hear the call to prayer."[7]
She continued to keep in touch with her family after her arrival, by text message and phone calls, and told them she was in a "house with other sisters" and doing "nothing special." Her family said they could hear other people in the background of their phone conversations.[7] They felt she was following a script given by ISIL.[9]
Within weeks, she called her family to tell them she had married a 25-year-old Tunisian ISIL fighter she had just met, named Farid.[3] Her brother told her it was against Islamic law for a woman to marry without her father's consent, and she said her father had no say in her marriage because he was not a real Muslim.[1][4]
Her brother stated that in her messages to him in the months after her departure from France, Sahra said she missed her family and spoke little about her life in Syria.[1] She told her brother she was doing housework and taking care of children, and that her life was much the same as it had been in France. She said she didn't want to return, and that she wanted her mother to accept her religion, her decision to travel to Syria, and her new husband, Farid.[4][9] She sent her family photos of Farid's pickup truck and said he bought her Chanel perfume, and said that she was happy, something her brother didn't believe.[8]
Sahra's family stated they believed she had been radicalized over social media.[11] Her parents said they were not sure if the Facebook messages they received from her account were actually being written by her.[4] They criticized the French government for allowing Sahra to leave the country so easily, saying, "The law needs to be changed because it's absurd that a minor can leave the country without parental permission, just with an identity card or passport."[6]