A German Muslim convert who joined the Islamic State group in Iraq was jailed for 10 years in Munich for killing a Yazidi girl she and her husband bought as a slave.
Jennifer Wenisch was found to be an accomplice to a war crime, having remained standing when her husband left the five-year-old girl chained outside in the scorching sun to die of thirst.
Wenisch’s husband, an Iraqi jihadist, is on trial in Frankfurt.
The girl died in Fallujah in 2015.
Wenisch, 30, denied the allegation. Her lawyers claimed that the baby’s mother, Nora, was an unreliable witness and said there was no evidence that the girl was actually dead. Nora and the girl had been enslaved by the IS, along with many other Yazidis.
The verdict on her husband, Taha al-Jumailly, is expected next month.
It is one of the first cases of IS crime against the Yazidi community going to trial. The Yazidis, a Kurdish group from northern Iraq, were a particular target of IS brutality.
Wenisch was tried in Germany due to the legal principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows prosecution for alleged war crimes, including genocide, occurring abroad. She was arrested in Turkey in 2016, then extradited to Germany, reports the AFP news agency.
Wenisch allegedly served on an IS “anti-vice squad” that enforced strict Islamic rules in Mosul and Fallujah.
London-based human rights lawyer Amal Clooney was part of the legal team representing the girl’s mother.
In 2014, IS fighters raided the ancestral heart of the Yazidi people in northern Iraq, kidnapping thousands of women and children as slaves.
Related topics
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- Yazidis
- Iraq
- Islamic State group
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