A woman returning from Syria will be tried in France for “genocide”, a first since the Second World War

The woman, born in the south of France and aged 35, is suspected of having, in spring 2015, enslaved a Yazidi teenager in Syria.

An investigating judge ordered a trial on Tuesday, September 24, in particular for “genocide” And “crimes against humanity” against Sonia M., a returnee from Syria and ex-wife of an emir of the Islamic State group, franceinfo learned from the national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office (Pnat), confirming information from AFP. This will be the first trial for genocide in France since the Second World War.

The woman, born in the south of France and aged 35, is suspected of having, in the spring of 2015, enslaved a Yazidi teenager in Syria, while she was living with her ex-husband Abdelnasser Benyoucef, considered one of the creators of the Islamic State’s external operations cell. Presumed dead since 2016, he is nevertheless the subject of an arrest warrant.

Sonia M., a French citizen from Grenoble, was married to Abdelnasser Benyoucef, an Algerian jihadist who grew up in France and is considered one of the masterminds of the Hyper Cacher attack and the failed attack in Villejuif. Sonia M. was living with Abdelnasser Benyoucef in an apartment in Raqqa, Syria, and was expecting a child from him in the spring of 2015 when he “bought” a 16-year-old Yezidi slave.

To collect the testimony of this young Yazidi woman nicknamed Roza (an assumed name), now aged 25 and living in a refugee camp near Erbil (Iraqi Kurdistan), French magistrates went there last February.

During her hearing, Roza explained that she was captured and abducted along with her two sisters and many other young Yazidi women on August 3, 2014, when the Islamic State group launched a coordinated attack in her region of Sinjar in northern Iraq, home to the Yazidi minority, a Kurdish-speaking, non-Muslim ethnic group. At least 3,000 Yazidis died in the assault, which the United Nations has described as genocide.

Roza remembers being put in a truck by a slave trader who sold her in Raqqa to Abdelnasser Benyoucef in the spring of 2015, then she says she was locked up for a month and ten days in his marital home, where Sonia M. was, pregnant. The young Yazidi woman describes a daily life of abuse, says she was raped almost every day by the jihadist and explains that her wife could not ignore it, the apartment being only a two-room apartment.

A domestic slave in this dwelling, Roza describes an ordeal, forced to do all the tasks required, forced to ask permission to drink, eat, shower. She confides having been mistreated including by Sonia M., hit at least twice with a shoe. The young Yezidi describes the wife of her torturer as dominant, carrying a pistol and not as a submissive woman who would have also been a victim of this man.

For her part, Sonia M., incarcerated in the Rhône-Alpes region since January 2020, firmly denies having been violent with the young Yazidi woman. She explains that Roza was her husband’s slave, not his, and that it was at her request that he ended up separating from her. Roza had then been “resold” to a Belgian jihadist. An investigation has also been opened by the Belgian justice system.