German justice must decide Tuesday, November 30 if an Iraqi jihadist was guilty of genocide of the Yazidi minority, a crucial verdict for the recognition of the abuses committed against this Kurdish-speaking community by the Islamic State (IS) organization.
To read also Nadia Murad, a resistant
The judgment, which will be pronounced by the High Regional Court of Frankfurt, is eagerly awaited because, in the event of the conviction of the accused, it would be the first time in the world that a judicial body has held that the atrocities committed against the Yazidis fall within the scope of " genocide ”, already recognized as such by UN investigators.
"This is a historic moment for the community," said
Natia Navrouzov, lawyer and member of the NGO Yazda, which gathers evidence of crimes committed by IS against the Yazidis, to AFP.
"This is the first time in the history of the Yazidis that a perpetrator
(of crimes)
finds himself in court on charges of genocide,"
she said.
Iraqi Taha Al-Jumailly, who joined the ranks of ISIS in 2013, has been responding since April 2020 for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and human trafficking, in particular.
He risks life imprisonment without the possibility of requesting release after 15 years.
German justice accuses him of having, during the summer of 2015 in Fallujah, Iraq, left to die of thirst a 5-year-old Yazidi girl he had with her mother
"bought as a slave"
, according to the prosecution.
For this package, his ex-wife Jennifer Wenisch, 30, has already been sentenced to ten years imprisonment last month for
"crime against humanity resulting in the death"
of the child.
"Attached to a window"
The mother of the little girl, Nora B., told the bar the ordeal endured by her child,
"tied to a window"
outside the house in temperatures
"up to 50 °"
, according to the floor. The accused, now 29 years old, intended to punish the girl, to whom he was inflicting ill-treatment, for having urinated on a mattress. The illiterate mother who sometimes speaks confusedly in Kurmandji, one of the Kurdish languages, testified that she was repeatedly raped by IS jihadists after they invaded her village in the Sinjar Mountains, in northwestern Iraq in August 2014.
The Yazidi ethno-religious minority has been particularly persecuted by ISIS, which has reduced its women to sexual slavery and killed men by the hundreds. The mother is represented by three lawyers, including the Lebanese-Briton Amal Clooney. She is leading - with the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Nadia Murad, a former ISIS sex slave from the same village as the victim - of a campaign to have these crimes recognized as genocide. To try this Iraqi, arrested in Greece in 2019 on an international arrest warrant, Germany applies the principle of "universal jurisdiction" which allows a state to prosecute the perpetrators of the most serious offenses even when they have been committed. outside the national territory.
See also A German ISIS receives ten years in prison for letting a Yazidi girl die
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