Nearly a decade after she left France for the war-torn landscapes of Syria, Carole Sun returned to a Paris courtroom this week to face judgment for a choice that would shape the rest of her life.
On Thursday, a special criminal court in Paris sentenced the 30-year-old Frenchwoman to 10 years in prison after finding her guilty of participating in a terrorist criminal conspiracy, marking the latest chapter in France’s long and painful reckoning with citizens drawn into the orbit of the so-called Islamic State.
Sun is the second Frenchwoman repatriated from Syrian detention camps to be convicted on terrorism-related charges. She was brought back to France in July 2022 as part of the country’s first coordinated effort to repatriate women and children held in camps in northeastern Syria following the collapse of IS’s self-proclaimed caliphate.
Her journey into extremism began online.
According to court testimony, Sun left France for Syria in July 2014, travelling with her brother at a time when IS was rapidly expanding its control and aggressively recruiting Western nationals through social media and encrypted platforms. She told the court she had been radicalised via the internet, drawn in by ideology before fully grasping its consequences.
In December 2017, as Kurdish-led forces dismantled IS strongholds, Sun was arrested and transferred to a detention camp housing women and children linked to the extremist group. She would remain there for more than four years, raising her children in what she later described as a brutal and lawless environment.
“It’s like a jungle,” she told the judges. “There is a moral war going on there, even among the children.”
During the trial, the court heard that Sun had lived among, and maintained close ties with, high-profile IS figures including individuals known either for their cruelty or for fighting in units connected to the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, which killed 130 people.
Her second husband, the judges noted, was a member of IS’s intelligence apparatus. In a message to her mother, Sun once described him as someone who “kills traitors.” He is currently imprisoned in Iraq, as is her brother.
While Sun did not take part in combat, the court ruled that her actions went beyond passive presence. She acknowledged contributing to IS propaganda efforts, an admission that weighed heavily in the court’s assessment of her role within the organisation.
“The ideology kept me from seeing how serious the events around me were,” she told the court, reflecting on her years in Syria.
The judges concluded that Sun could not plausibly claim ignorance of the group’s crimes, given the company she kept and the environment in which she lived.
Her case is part of a broader judicial effort in France to address the legacy of citizens who joined IS abroad. According to the public prosecutor, more than one-third of French women who travelled to Syria or Iraq have now returned.
Since 2017, 30 women have been tried by France’s special criminal court on terrorism charges, while others have faced prosecution in ordinary criminal courts. Around 60 women are still awaiting trial.
For French authorities, the challenge remains balancing justice, security and accountability—particularly in cases involving women who did not fight on the battlefield but lived within, supported or helped sustain one of the world’s most brutal extremist movements.
For Sun, the sentence closes one chapter but opens another—this time behind prison walls, far from the ideology that once promised purpose, and closer to a society still grappling with the consequences of radicalisation in the digital age.