June 21 () –
A court in Koblenz, in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, on Wednesday sentenced a 37-year-old woman to nine years in prison for belonging to the jihadist organization Islamic State in Iraq and enslaving a young woman from the Yazidi minority.
The 37-year-old woman traveled from Germany to Syria to join the terror group with her husband in December 2014, after which the couple moved to Mosul, Iraq, in 2015, where the husband worked as a doctor for fighters from Islamic State while she cared for two of her daughters, as reported by the ARD chain.
The couple returned to Syria in late 2016, bringing with them a captive 22-year-old Yazidi woman, who was kidnapped by Islamic State members in 2014 after the group attacked her village in the Sinjar region of Iraq. The defendant returned to Germany in March 2021 and was detained at Frankfurt International Airport.
The court has ruled that the defendant’s husband raped and beat the young woman while the defendant, found guilty of crimes against humanity, as well as incitement to genocide, allowed and even encouraged it.
It is not the first sentence in Germany of this style. A German federal court in Frankfurt sentenced in November 2021 a member of the Islamic State to life imprisonment for war crimes and genocide for retaining and abusing a girl from the Yazidi minority whom he kept enslaved in the Iraqi city of Fallujah between July and September 2015.
The verdict stipulated that the convicted person had to pay 50,000 euros to the mother of the five-year-old girl, who died of thirst tied to a fence in the defendant’s yard, Taha Al-J, an Iraqi citizen whose full name was not disclosed for legal reasons. .
Germany’s parliament passed a resolution in July 2022 to recognize the genocide of the Yazidi minority by the jihadist group Islamic State after taking parts of northern and western Iraq in its lightning campaign in 2014.
