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France jails seven for recruiting Iraqi fighters
PARIS (AFP) — Five French men, an Algerian and a Moroccan were sentenced to between 18 months and seven years in jail on Wednesday for running a network that recruited young Muslims in Paris to fight in Iraq.
A Paris court found the seven men, aged between 24 and 40, guilty of travelling to Iraq to fight US-led forces or recruiting young men in Paris' heavily-immigrant northeast to be fighters from 2004 to 2006.
Frenchmen Farid Benyettou, 27, and Boubakeur El Hakim, 24, considered the ringleaders of the recruitment ring, received a sentence of six years and seven years respectively.
The court ruled that Benyettou had sent young men "to fight in Iraq, possibly carry out suicide attacks, after joining the troops of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi," Al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq killed in a US air strike in 2006.
At least a dozen youths from the Paris region, either foreign or of North African descent, many of them friends since childhood, are known to have travelled to fight US-led forces in Iraq.
