(Munich) Accused of letting a Yazidi girl enslaved in Iraq to die of thirst, a German member of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) was sentenced Monday to ten years in prison by a Munich court.
Jennifer Wenisch, 30, was notably convicted of a “crime against humanity resulting in death” and membership of a terrorist organization, in one of the first trials in the world to try a war crime against the Yazidis , Kurdish-speaking minority persecuted by jihadists.
Dressed in a black sweater, her long brown hair detached, the young woman did not react to the announcement of her sentence, more lenient than the life imprisonment demanded by the prosecution.
“You should have known from the start that a child chained up under a blazing sun would be in danger of death,” the President of the Court, Reinhold Baier, told him on Monday.
But the judges also recognized that the ex-jihadist “had only limited possibilities to end the enslavement” of the victims, according to a statement from the court.
This German native of Lohne, in Lower Saxony (north-west), had won Iraq in 2014 to join “her brothers”, as she explained during the trial started 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 decreed by the jihadists.
Dying of thirst
In the summer of 2015, she and her then-husband Taha Al-Jumailly, tried in Frankfurt in parallel proceedings, bought as slaves, among a group of prisoners, a five-year-old girl and her mother from the minority. Yazidi.
A key witness in the Munich and Frankfurt trials, the surviving mother, who now lives in hiding in Germany, delivered the story of the abuse suffered.
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 was forced to remain in the service of the couple.
Accused of having let it happen without intervening, Jennifer Wenisch told the hearing to have “been afraid” that her companion “does (her) push or lock him”.
During the trial, the young woman did not really provide an explanation of her radicalization journey.
Shy during the first hearings, she was then emboldened.
“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 ”, she had defended, according to statements quoted by the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Bugged
She was arrested by Turkish security services in January 2016 in Ankara and then extradited to Germany.
She was not taken into custody until June 2018, after being arrested while attempting to re-enter, with her two-year-old daughter, the territories that ISIS still controlled in Syria.
During this attempt, she recounted her life in Iraq to her driver, who was actually an FBI informant driving her in a car equipped with microphones. The prosecution used these tapes to indict him.
This trial is one of the first concerning crimes committed against the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority in northern Iraq.
In October 2020, a German-Tunisian woman, wife of a jihadist, was sentenced by a German court to three and a half years in prison for having notably contributed to reducing a young Yazidi as a slave when she was staying in Syria.
Two other Germans repatriated since 2020 from ISIS territories are suspected of complicity in crimes against humanity in connection with the atrocities committed against the Yazidi minority.
This Yazidi ethnoreligious community has been particularly persecuted by jihadists, who reduced its women to sexual slavery, forcibly recruited child soldiers and killed men by the hundreds.