“Of all our jailers, ‘George’ was the most aggressive… and the most brutal”, describes Didier François, ex-hostage of the “Beatles”, a group of kidnappers from the Islamic State (IS) known for having staged the beheading of Westerners. For several months, the French journalist was one of the captives in Syria of this terrorist cell, active until 2015. According to the American authorities, the group beheaded at least 27 journalists and humanitarians from a dozen countries. The bloody videos of the murders, broadcast on the Internet, had shocked the whole world.
butcher knife
Nearly a decade after the kidnapping of the war reporter, the trial of El Shafee el-Sheikh, alias “Jihadi George”, has just opened on Wednesday in the United States. At 33, the man with the long beard and curly hair appears before the federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, composed of 18 jurors, and where up to 70 witnesses could speak. Accused in particular of taking hostages resulting in death, and of conspiring to commit murder, he faces the death penalty – Washington having pledged not to seek the death penalty in order to obtain judicial cooperation from London .
Born in 1988 in Sudan, El Shafee el-Sheikh spent his childhood in London with his mother and two brothers. The mechanic married at the age of 21 to an Ethiopian met during a trip to Canada, who would not have been authorized by the immigration services to join him on British soil. While his brother was sentenced to ten years in prison for his role in a deadly dispute, the young man fell into radical Islam, and set sail for Syria in 2012 with Mohammed Emwazi, alias “Jihadi John”, another emblematic executioner of the EI. Killed in an airstrike in Raqqa in 2015, the latter had appeared several times on gruesome propaganda images, a butcher’s knife in hand, in front of kneeling Western hostages dressed in orange outfits. In August 2014, a video showed him beheading journalist James Foley, the first American hostage executed by the jihadist group.
Drowning simulations, electrocution…
It was in September 2013 that French journalists Didier François and Edouard Elias (kidnapped on June 6, 2013), as well as the duo Nicolas Hénin and Pierre Torres (kidnapped on June 22, 2013) met the “Beatles” for the first time. “We had just been transferred to a furniture factory in the north of Aleppo when we saw them disembark. We were asked to face the wall. I turned around and got a slap.” explains Didier François. The reporter remembers the “terror” in the eyes of the other hostages with whom they had been grouped (the American James Foley, the British John Cantlie, the Italian Federico Motka…), and who had already suffered the abuse of the jihadists. The prosecution believes that the group engaged in acts of torture on its captives, including waterboarding, electrocution sessions, strangulation causing fainting or food deprivation. The journalist also describes the “Syrians, Kurds or Yazidis massacred or slaughtered by the dozens and without discussion”.
The hostages rub shoulders more and more with the “Beatles”, in Idlib then in Raqqa, where they will be moved at the end of December. In this city in central Syria, a former stronghold of Daesh, they are locked up for two weeks in a room, right next to the terrorists. “They were still just as violent, they tortured us. One day “George” made me put in the center of the room. He gave me a straight line. I had a toothache.” It details the personality of the three jihadists involved – the fourth, Aine Lesley Davis, is imprisoned in Turkey –, “who never left each other” : “Of the three, ‘George’ was the most aggressive and unpredictable, while ‘John’ was more calm and determined. “Ringo” [Alexanda Kotey, arrêté par les forces kurdes syriennes en 2018 avec “George” et transféré lui aussi aux Etats-Unis, ndlr] was the most composed.
“The Possibility of Reparation”
Faced with American investigators, “George” and “Ringo” acknowledged their role in the kidnapping of hostages, including four Frenchmen, according to a note from the DGSI quoted by the Parisian. The former would also have admitted to having “beat the hostages to intimidate them and deter any escape attempt”. The French journalists were finally released in April 2014, but many others were not so lucky.
On the first day of the trial, Didier François knows that “it is not justice that allows us to fight against jihadism”: “What matters to me is that these guys are out of harm’s way and that they can’t be able to recruit.”At the end of the line, the journalist Nicolas Hénin, he expects a lot from the procedure: “Our hostage-taking was marked by arbitrariness, injustice. This trial offers the possibility of reparation, of an appointment of responsibilities, of a return to the rule of law… It does not come to heal all the wounds, it will not bring back the dead, but it is the best answer possible.