Should France Take an ISIS Recruiter Back?

She was born in France, converted to Islam, left to join ISIS and now wants to come home. Should she be allowed back in?

Having spent the last five years living in Syria, where she joined Islamic extremists, Emilie König, 33, wants to come home to France. But does France want her back?

The daughter of a policeman from a small town in Brittany, she converted to Islam as a teenager. After she began covering herself from head to toe in a black abaya and veil, she felt so scorned in France that she left her two small children to go to Syria, eventually becoming a prominent propagandist and recruiter for the Islamic State. “She would like to come back; she has asked for pardon from her family, her friends, her country,” her mother said in an interview with Ouest-France, a newspaper in Brittany, after speaking to her daughter by telephone two weeks ago.

“She would like to come back; she has asked for pardon from her family, her friends, her country,” her mother said in an interview with Ouest-France, a newspaper in Brittany, after speaking to her daughter by telephone two weeks ago.

Ms. König’s personal story is unusual, not least because she is a convert and gained prominence within the male-dominated Islamic State. Yet the quandary her case poses is an increasingly common one for France and other European countries: What should they do when citizens who are former Islamic State fighters or supporters want to return?

The answer is, of course, non. But whether France, now entering its Islamic cultural death throes, has the fortitude to stand up against a bona-fide traitoress is questionable. Treason is apparently no longer taken seriously, either in Europe or America, and the international Left’s common cause with Islam is bound and determined to keep it that way.

While the estimated numbers aren’t large, neither are they inconsiderable. And there’s no doubt these people are dangerous:

An estimated 4,300 people had left Europe to fight in Syria and Iraq as of April 2016, according to a recent study by the Hague-based International Center for Counter-Terrorism. Others have put the number at 5,000 or even higher. French law enforcement officials estimate that about 690 French foreign fighters are still in Syria and that about 43 percent — 295 — are women, the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said in an interview in November on FranceInfo.

Among the jihadists from France who went to fight in Iraq and Syria in 2015, nearly a third were women — a larger proportion than any other European country at the time, according to intelligence experts and French intelligence documents that are not public but were shared with the French news media. Among those women, Ms. König may have one of the highest profiles, not least for having the distinction of being listed as a terrorist and subject to sanctions by both United Nations and the United States. (Only one other woman, from Britain, made the lists.)

There’s a catch, of course — a real Catch-22. European countries consider middle-eastern hellholes like Syria incapable of conducting fair trials and subjecting European citizens to a possible death penalty, so “human rights” pressures are brought to bear on governments to repatriate people like Emilie König — whose purposeless life in secular France sent her to Syria to look for a man:

One of her greatest wishes, as she was on the brink of going to Syria, was to find a man. “She was looking for a virile man, for a man who would fulfill her, who represented a warrior,” said Ms. de Féo, adding that perhaps it was linked to having been abandoned by her father. Once she arrived in Syria, Ms. König began posting many propaganda videos on social media, which are striking for their boldness. She is shown at target practice and makes a full-throated appeal for Muslims to support the Islamic State.

“I am not a monster. I am very far from a monster.”

Oh, she’s a monster all right: dedicated to the deaths of innocents and to the death of French civilisation and European Christian culture. Do the French have the courage to tell her?