A German court has jailed a woman for more than nine years for enslaving a Yazidi woman, as well as aiding and abetting war crimes and genocide as a member of ISIL (ISIS).
The 37-year-old German defendant, identified only as Nadine K, was also found guilty of crimes against humanity and membership in a foreign terrorist organisation, a spokesperson for the court in the western city of Koblenz said.
The defendant was a member of ISIL between December 2014 and March 2019, travelling to Syria to join the group with her husband.
In 2015, the couple moved to Mosul in Iraq, then back to Syria.
From April 2016, the pair kept as a slave a Yazidi woman who had been imprisoned by ISIL since 2014.
Nadine K kept watch to prevent the woman, who was 22 at the time, from fleeing and forced her to do housework and observe strict Islamic rituals.
With the knowledge of the defendant, Nadine K’s husband regularly raped and beat the Yazidi woman.
“All of this served the declared purpose of IS (Islamic State/ISIL), to wipe out the Yazidi faith,” prosecutors said at the trial’s opening earlier this year.
Nadine K and her family are believed to have taken the woman with them when they moved back to ISIL-controlled territory in Syria in 2016 where they remained until March 2019.
It was then that the Yazidi woman was finally freed, after Kurdish fighters arrested the family.
The defendant returned to Germany last year in one of several repatriation operations and was arrested on arrival.
In October 2021, ISIL member Jennifer Wenisch was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a Munich court over the death of a 5-year-old Yazidi girl she and her husband had enslaved who was chained beneath the hot sun and left to die of thirst.
Wenisch was also convicted for being part of the hardline group, but most of the sentence related to the girl’s death.
In May 2022, Leonora Messing, another German woman who joined ISIL, was cleared of slavery charges involving a Yazidi woman in Syria, but found guilty of being a member of ISIL. Messing had travelled to Syria as a 15-year-old and was given a two-year suspended sentence.
In January, Germany’s lower house recognised the 2014 massacre of Kurdish-speaking Yazidis by ISIL as genocide, condemning “indescribable atrocities” and “tyrannical injustice” carried out by ISIL fighters “with the intention of completely wiping out the Yazidi community”.
After seizing large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014, ISIL killed more than 1,200 Yazidis, enslaved 7,000 Yazidi women and girls, and displaced most of the 550,000-strong community from their homes in northern Iraq.
A German court in November 2021 issued the first ruling worldwide to recognise crimes against the Yazidi community as genocide, in a verdict hailed by activists as a “historic” win for the minority.
About 150,000 Yazidis now live in Germany.
