French IS member Koenig arrested

CAIRO – 9 January 2018: People’s Protection Units (YPG), a mainly Kurdish militia in Syria, arrested days ago the dangerous French Islamic State (IS) member Emilie Koenig, 33.

Koenig’s mother said that she received a phone call from her daughter, who told her that she is detained in one of the Kurdish fighters’ camps in Syria. According to Koenig’s mother, Koenig was "interrogated and tortured".

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) denied torturing Koenig and said that the mother and her three children are staying currently in a camp in Al-Hawl town, in northeastern Syria.

Koenig appeared in a video released by the YPG, where she denied the claim that she had been tortured.



Koenig said in the video, where she appeared speaking in broken Arabic, that the YPG only asked her questions, pictured her and took her fingerprints. The interrogation lasted only for an hour or two, and there was no torture at all, according to Koenig.

French authorities froze Koenig’s assets in 2012 after she had left France for Syria. Koenig was added to a United Nations watch list and the US State Department's list for encouraging attacks in France, according to Kurdistan 24.

In June 2017, UK punk singer Sally Jones, who became an IS member and was believed to have recruited hundreds of women from the United Kingdom to join the IS, was reported killed in a U.S. airstrike.