The criminal court in Baghdad sentenced three French citizens, identified as Charly S., Kamal M., and Amir A., to life imprisonment after finding them guilty of joining the Islamic State terrorist organization. According to international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, the life sentence provided for by the Iraqi legal system equates to twenty years of actual detention in the country's prisons.

The three defendants were found guilty of the offense of association with the jihadist group and of cooperating with other affiliates in spreading terror in the Middle Eastern region. The decision follows other sentences handed down a few days earlier, when six other French citizens received life sentences and a seventh man was sentenced to fifteen years of detention.

All the individuals convicted so far were part of a group of forty-seven French citizens transferred last year to Iraqi territory from detention centers located in Syria. The complex judicial handling of foreign fighters remains at the center of international diplomatic attention following the extremist group's total loss of territorial control.

The organization formerly led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had established a self-proclaimed caliphate between 2014 and 2019, recruiting thousands of militants from abroad. Iraq formally declared military victory in 2017, while the final Syrian territorial outpost in Baghouz definitively fell in March 2019.