It is one of the few trials that has made it possible to punish the atrocities committed by the Islamic State group against the Kurdish Yazidi minority. A German, member of the terrorist organization, has just been sentenced by a Munich court to ten years in prison for letting a Yazidi girl enslaved in Iraq to die of thirst.
The story is terrifying. In 2014, Jennifer Wenisch, a Muslim German from a small town in Lower Saxony, in northwestern Germany, traveled to Iraq to join the Islamic State group. For several months in 2015, she was part of the morality police responsible for enforcing the Islamist order with lashes and other corporal punishment. She is then armed and wears an explosive jacket.
That same year 2015, Jennifer Wenisch and her husband bought as slaves a 5-year-old girl and her mother, both belonging to the Yazidis, a minority persecuted by Islamists for religious reasons. One day, the sick little girl urinates on her mattress. Jennifer Wenish’s husband chains the child in full sun in 50 degrees to make her die of thirst. The German lets it go and only intervenes when it is clearly too late.
Arrested in 2016 in Ankara by the Turkish services, Jennifer Wenisch was extradited to Germany where she was left free. In 2018, she tried to join the Islamic State group in Syria, via Iraq. She tells the story to her driver, who records the conversation because he’s an FBI agent. Confessions used against the young woman during this trial, where she has just been sentenced to ten years in prison when she risked life imprisonment.
This is the tip of the iceberg that appears with this trial. Just over two weeks ago, Germany and Denmark repatriated from Syria 11 women and 37 children held by the Kurds at Roj camp in northeastern Syria. Among the women who returned to Germany, one of them is also suspected of complicity in crimes against humanity in connection with abuses committed against the Yazidi minority.
This German woman had successively married at least six members of the Islamic State group and was showing her child videos of executions carried out by the jihadist organization. According to the federal prosecutor’s office, she too would have used a woman belonging to the Yazidi community as a slave. France, for its part, continues to practice the case-by-case policy for the repatriation of women and children of jihadists detained in Syria.