Germany: ISIS jihadist tried for genocide against the Yazidis

An alleged member of the Islamic State (IS) appears from Friday in Germany for genocide and the murder of a child of the Yazidi minority whom he had reduced, like his mother, to the state of slave. Presented as Taha al-J., 37, originally from Iraq, he is also accused of crimes against humanity, war crimes and human trafficking before the Frankfurt Regional Superior Court.

His wife, the German Jennifer Wenisch, has been appearing for a year before a Munich court for the murder of the little girl, whom the couple is accused of having died of thirst in 2015 in Fallujah, Iraq. The opening of the hearing in April 2019 was considered the first trial in the world of the atrocities committed by the jihadist organization against the Yazidis, a Kurdish minority in northern Iraq, persecuted and enslaved by jihadists from 2014.

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The mother of the child, presented by the press as Nora, testified several times in Munich of the ordeal that she claims to have suffered with her little daughter, Rania. According to the indictment, Taha al-J. joined the ranks of IS in March 2013 and held various positions until last year on behalf of the organization in Raqqa, the “capital” of the IS group in Syria, but also in Iraq and Turkey.

German justice accuses him in particular of having "at the end of May-beginning of June 2015 bought as slaves" a woman of the Yazidi minority and her five-year-old daughter and of having taken them to Falloujah, where they were subjected to serious ill-treatment and were in food deprived parties. After many ill-treatments, in the summer of 2015, the little girl had been "punished" by the accused for having urinated on a mattress, and tied to a window outside the house where she lived locked up with her mother by temperatures around 50 ° C. The girl died of thirst while the mother was forced to walk outside barefoot, suffering severe burns due to the extreme heat of the ground.

The two victims were kidnapped in the summer of 2014 after IS invaded the Iraqi Sinjar region. They were then repeatedly "sold" on "slave markets" , according to the prosecution.

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Placed under high police surveillance, this trial should run at least until the end of August. Arrested in Greece on May 16, 2019, the accused was handed over to Germany on October 9 and placed in pre-trial detention the next day.

At the trial of Jennifer Wenisch, the mother of the little victim is represented by the Lebanese-British lawyer Amal Clooney and by the Yazidie Nadia Murad, former IS sex slave and co-winner of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. The two women are leading an international campaign to recognize crimes committed against the Yazidis as genocide.

However, proving the existence of genocide in court is difficult because the will to destroy an entire group like the Yazidis must be proven, according to specialists. "There is often no order to annihilate," Leipzig University lawyer Alexander Schwarz told AFP. "There are no written instructions in which appears: " Annihilate the Yazidis ".

Read also: The dreadful tales of Islamic State slaves

The small Yazidi ethno-religious minority is considered the most persecuted by the jihadists, who reduced their wives to sexual slavery, forcibly recruited child soldiers and killed men by the hundreds. In August 2014, the IS carried out, according to the UN, a potential genocide: according to their authorities, more than 1,280 Yazidis were killed, and more than 6,400 Yazidis were kidnapped.

Many non-Arab Iraqis and non-Muslims, many Yazidis found refuge in Germany, especially in the south-west of the country where women and their children, victims of repeated rapes, were taken care of and treated. Among the beneficiaries of this program implemented at the end of 2014 was Nadia Murad, who now travels the world.