Former Islamic State member convicted of genocide over death of 5-year-old Yazidi girlExBulletin

Iraq Taha Al-J. was taken to the courtroom at the Frankfurt Regional High Court before the verdict is announced in Frankfurt, Germany, on Tuesday.

Frank Rumpenhorst / AP

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Frank Rumpenhorst / AP

Iraq Taha Al-J. was taken to the courtroom at the Frankfurt Regional High Court before the verdict is announced in Frankfurt, Germany, on Tuesday.

Frank Rumpenhorst / AP

BERLIN A former member of the Islamic State group was convicted by a German court on Tuesday of genocide and committing a war crime over the death of a 5-year-old Yazidi girl he had bought as a slave and then chained to the hot sun. to die.

The Frankfurt Regional Court sentenced Taha Al-J., An Iraqi citizen whose full surname was not published due to privacy rules, to life imprisonment and ordered him to pay the girl’s mother 50,000 euros (57,000 dollars).

The German news agency dpa quoted the presiding judge, Christoph Koller, as saying it was the first genocide sentence worldwide over the role of a person in IS systematic persecution of the Yazidi religious minority.

Defendant’s attorneys had denied the charges against their client.

His The German woman was convicted last month with 10 years in prison for the death of the girl.

The girl’s mother, who survived the captivity, testified in both trials and participated as a co-plaintiff.

Yazidis and their supporters praise the recognition of genocide

“This is the moment the Yazidis have been waiting for,” said attorney Amal Clooney, who acted as an adviser to the mother. “To finally hear a judge, after seven years, declare that what they suffered was genocide. Watching a man face justice for killing a Yazidi girl because she was a Yazidi.”

Zemfira Dlovani, a lawyer and member of Germany’s Central Yazidi Council, also welcomed the decision.

“We can only hope that it will serve as a milestone for further cases to follow,” she told the Associated Press, noting that thousands of Yazidi women were enslaved and mistreated by the Islamic State group. “This should be the beginning, not the end.”

The United Nations has called IS’s attack on the Yazidi ancestral homeland in northern Iraq genocide in 2014, saying the 400,000 Yazidi community “all were displaced, captured or killed.” Of the thousands captured by IS, boys were forced to fight for extremists, men were executed if they did not convert to Islam, and were often executed on every occasion, and women and girls were sold into slavery.

Grim details were revealed during the trial

According to German prosecutors, Al-J. bought a Yazidi woman and her 5-year-old daughter Reda as slaves at an IS base in Syria in 2015. Both were taken hostage by militants from the northern Iraqi city of Kocho in early August 2014 and were “sold and resold.” several times as slaves “by the group already.

Defendant took his wife and daughter to his home in the Iraqi city of Fallujah and forced them to “keep the house and live according to strict Islamic rules” while giving them insufficient food and beating them regularly to punish them. , according to the indictment.

Prosecutors allege that at the end of 2015, Al-J. tied the girl with chains to the bars of a window in the open sun on a day when the temperature reached 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) and she died from punishment. The sentence is suspected to have been carried out because the 5-year-old had wet the bed.

Al-J. was arrested in Greece and extradited to Germany two years ago.
The German authorities took the matter according to the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows the country to try particularly serious crimes even if they were committed elsewhere and has no direct connection to Germany.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad, who is herself a survivor of IS atrocities, said the decision was “a victory for genocide survivors, survivors of sexual violence and the entire Yazidi community.”

“Germany is not only raising awareness of the need for justice, but is acting on it,” she said in a statement. “Their use of universal jurisdiction in this case can and should be repeated by governments around the world.”