French hostages in Syria: in the Paris court, the account of eleven months of terror

The hearing has not yet started and a sound laughter sounds in the Voltaire room of the Paris court. The laughter of a 64 -year -old bearded adventurer, war reporter and reservist of the army, Didier François. He is one of the four journalists called upon to testify before the special assize court of their detention in Syria by Islamist terrorists, from summer 2013 to spring 2014.

Wednesday, February 19, the former member of the editors of Libération And from Europe 1 joking with some of his colleagues who came to cover this trial where five men accused of having been among his jailers are tried, including French Mehdi Nemmouche. Meanwhile, a gendarme comes to ask three children to go out, just before Edouard Elias, the photographer captured at the same time as Didier François on June 6, 2013, waves his testimony. “I’m going to tell you about my eleven months of detention, it will surely take a little bit of time”he said in the introduction.

“We were rags”

It will take almost four hours, including questions, and we understand why childish ears did not really have their place between these walls. With modesty, the ex-hostage, who was 22 years old at the time and 33 years today, describes the ordeal he had to endure. The simulacres of execution with the cannon of a weapon on the forehead, the strangulation pushed to the fainting, the sexual touching, the blows which rain to make his face blue, hunger, thirst, water Bue in the toilet bowl … “We were rags”he recalls.

Proten in several different places, Édouard Elias also evokes the idea of ​​committing suicide by putting a bag on his head, the men slaughtered in front of his door, the “Living corpses” Let him cross and the cries he hears through the walls, at the Ophthalmological Hospital of Aleppo transformed into a prison. “There, it is continuously, continuously, cries of people, Syrians being tortured and die, all the time,The day, the nighthe said. This place is a killing machine, it is an absolute horror. »»

But the photographer, long placed in isolation, also talks about the day he heard a voice screaming « ami »in French. It was Didier François, this experienced colleague with whom he had decided to report in this dangerous area because he had fully confidence in him and from which he had been separated after their capture. The young man went on: “ Friend, you hear the deaf cries of the country that we continue ”. It is the Song of supportersthe anthem of the resistance, which his compatriot in turn sang.

Édouard Elias then understood that he was not “More alone”, A turning point. From there, he thought he was going “Lift your head” and become “Someone who was fighting”, With a goal in mind: memorize the maximum of information, despite the headbands on the eyes, to testify later. “With Didier, we thought that if we came out of this place one day, we had to have enough elements to tell them, because these people were dangerous. You had to be attentive, listening, it was a form of combat ”.

“A real pair”

In the event, the two journalists support each other. “We were a real pair. But Didier’s problem is that he is grumpy when he is hungry, and we were always hungry ”, joke Norbert Elias. There is life, despite everything, like these pilled pens to the guards to make a chessboard where olives serve as a queen and a tower. Or this Christmas log made with pieces of bread. And the liberation, finally, on April 18, 2014, with the two other French journalists, Nicolas Hénin and Pierre Torres.

In turn, at the beginning of the afternoon, Didier François approaches the bar to express himself, like an expert in jihadism that he has become. He embarked on a long digression on the political context of the time in Syria. “What to understand is that we had fallen into a totalitarian system which works by terror inside and by terrorism outside”he sums up.

But the sixties who have covered wars and hostage -taking for forty years has also paid tribute to Édouard Elias: “I would not have held eleven months if he had not been by my side.” Today, the photographer still exercises his job in conflict areas. In January, he returned to Syria when the Bashar Al Assad diet fell. When he was asked to have what he left for these eleven months, he replied: “This is something I drag in me. At the same time, it is a force ”.