Accused of having left a Yazidi girl enslaved in Iraq to die of thirst, a German member of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) was sentenced Monday, October 25 to ten years in prison by a court in Munich.
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Accused in particular of war crimes and murder, Jennifer Wenisch, 30, faced life imprisonment in one of the first trials in the world to prosecute a war crime against the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority persecuted and enslaved by jihadists in Iraq and in Syria.
This German native of Lohne, in Lower Saxony (north-west), had gone to Iraq to join "
her brothers
", as she explained during the trial which began in April 2019. For several months, she patrolled there, armed, within the morality police in Fallujah and Mosul.
This force notably ensured respect for the rules of dress and behavior set by the jihadists.
The girl bought as a slave
In the summer of 2015, she and her then-husband Taha Al-Jumailly, currently on trial in Frankfurt in parallel proceedings, bought a five-year-old girl and her mother from the Yazidi minority from a group of prisoners in order to exploit them as slaves, according to the prosecution.
After numerous mistreatments, the little girl was "
punished
" by the husband of the accused for having urinated on a mattress, then tied, in temperatures around 50 ° C, to a window outside the house.
The girl died of thirst while her mother, Nora T., was forced to remain in the service of the couple.
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Accused of having let her companion do it without intervening, Jennifer Wenisch told the hearing to have "
been afraid
" that he "
does (her) push or lock him up
". Her lawyers, like those for Taha Al-Jumailly, tried to suggest that the girl, later taken to a hospital in Fallujah, may not have died.
A version contested by the mother of the child, Nora T., who now lives in hiding in Germany.
A key witness, the survivor was heard during the trials of the ex-spouses.
“
They will make me an example for everything that happened under ISIS.
It is difficult to imagine that this is possible in a state of law
”, had defended Wenisch during one of the last hearings, according to remarks reported by the newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung
.
Trapped by an FBI informant
She was arrested by Turkish security services in January 2016 in Ankara and then extradited to Germany.
But she was not taken into custody until June 2018, after being arrested while trying to reach with her two-year-old daughter the territories that IS still controlled in Syria.
It was during this attempt that she told her driver about her life in Iraq.
The latter was actually an FBI informant who drove her in a car equipped with microphones.
The prosecution used these tapes to indict him.
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This trial is one of the first concerning crimes committed against the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority in northern Iraq.
The small Yazidi ethno-religious minority has been particularly persecuted by jihadists, who reduced their women to sexual slavery, forcibly recruited child soldiers and killed men by the hundreds.
