She Left France to Fight in Syria. Now She Wants to Return. But Can She?<br />that A Kurdish state does not exist, and French citizens cannot be judged by the Kurds,<br />French law enforcement officials estimate that about 690 French foreign fighters are still in Syria and<br />that about 43 percent — 295 — are women, the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said in an interview in November on FranceInfo.<br />A spokesman for the Syrian Kurdish Defense Forces, Mustafa Bali, said his leadership urged "all countries, European or other, to extradite their women<br />and children." But many European countries appear hesitant.<br />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<br />that are not public but were shared with the French news media.<br />Yet the quandary her case poses is an increasingly common one for France<br />and other European countries: What should they do when citizens who are former Islamic State fighters or supporters want to return?<br />She appears to have made the decision to go to Syria on her own rather than following a husband or boyfriend there, said<br />Agnès de Féo, a sociologist who filmed Ms. König in 2012 for the documentary about French women who wore the full veil.
