PARIS — She is described as a “true muse” of the Islamic State in France and could face a special criminal court as a “recruiter, matchmaker and propagandist” for the terrorist organization, according to the indictment issued by the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) on Sept. 15.
Emilie König is one of several young French and European women who traveled to Syria in the early 2010s, drawn by the idea of a “caliphate” and persuaded by jihadist ideology. After the defeat of the Islamic State, she was repatriated to France in July 2022, immediately placed in pre-trial detention, and charged with criminal association with a terrorist enterprise by an anti-terrorism judge.
König was born the youngest of four children in 1984 in Ploemer, Morbihan department in the Brittany region. She was abandoned by her father, a maritime police officer, at the age of two and later claimed to have been abused by her mother’s partner during adolescence. At 17, she converted to Islam and worked for a time as a bartender in a nightclub in Lorient.
After having two children with a violent man she considered insufficiently religious, she moved to Boulogne, in the Paris suburbs, where she began seeking love on Salafist networks. She told sociologist Agnès de Féo, who met her in spring 2012, that she started wearing the full veil after the 2010 law “prohibiting the concealment of the face in public spaces” was enacted, which she viewed as a provocation.
Recruiter for ISIS
She told the same sociologist that she had violent urges: “When I see soldiers in the street, my only thought is to take their weapons and use them,” she said. Meanwhile, König was an activist with Forsane Alizza, a radical Islamist group in Nantes that advocated the creation of a caliphate and the introduction of Sharia law in France before being dissolved in March 2012. In November, she traveled to Syria for the first time via Turkey to join her husband, a convert fighting in the ranks of the Islamic State. She was one of the first French women to join the terrorist group, which she promoted on social media in order to convince other volunteers to join. In 2013, she returned to France with the aim of going back to Syria with her two children. Her efforts were in vain.
She then settled in the Aleppo region with her new husband, the jihadist Alex Baeza from Nîmes, who was killed in combat in 2014. During these two years, König appeared in a video training in the use of weapons and continued her role as a recruiter for ISIS. This role earned her a place on the “list of sanctions against ISIL (ISIS) and al-Qaeda” of the United Nations Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee. According to the committee, she regularly telephoned her contacts in France to encourage them to commit violent acts against specific targets, such as French institutions or the wives of French soldiers. She is also on the list of the most wanted terrorists in the United States, which suspects her of having recruited nearly 200 French women to join the Islamic State.
Kurdish prison camp
In accordance with the “social and demographic project” advocated by the Islamic State, as the PNAT puts it, König had three more children between 2015 and 2017, when Kurdish forces captured her at a time when ISIS was in disarray. She and her children were placed in the Roj jihadist prison camp in northeastern Syria, near the Turkish border.
In January 2021, her three children were repatriated to France and placed under the guardianship of the Morbihan departmental council. König’s mother had taken in her first two children, before health problems forced her to place them in foster care. When interviewed by AFP in the Roj camp in April 2021, the Breton jihadist said she wanted to “return to work,” get her children back, and even escape prison, believing she had no blood on her hands.
In July 2022, König was repatriated to France as part of a group of 16 French mothers. She was placed in solitary confinement at the Fresnes prison, south of Paris, before being transferred in early 2024 to the women’s prison in Rennes, in Brittany.
An initial psychiatric assessment revealed a “ criminally dangerous” personality, but a more recent assessment in detention highlighted a “positive dynamic” and a “process of introspection.” On July 29, the PNAT finally requested a trial for criminal association with a terrorist enterprise. It is now up to the judge in charge of the investigation to decide whether to refer König, who has spent 10 years in Syria, including five as a detainee, to a special criminal court.