Female ISIS member convicted of genocide after keeping slave and dragging her by hair

The officials said that the woman's husband kept a Kurdish Yazidi woman, "M" as a slave and that she had been physically abused "almost every day"

Mirror, UK/July 28, 2022

By Rachel Hagan

A German ISIS woman who facilitated her husband’s physical and sexual abuse of a Syrian girl and also herself attacked her has been given a second genocide conviction, a court heard.

On Wednesday a court in Hamburg convicted a German-Afghan ISIS member known as Jalda A — in line with German privacy laws —aided and abetted ISIS’ attempt to destroy the Yazidi ethnoreligious group and that the crimes committed amounted to genocide.

They said it was "unthinkable" that the defendant was not aware of ISIS’ persecution of the Yazidis after having lived in the so-called Islamic State for more than three years and being married to high-ranking ISIS members.

The officials said that the woman's husband kept a Kurdish Yazidi woman, "M" as a slave and that Jalda had physically abused the woman "almost every day" and watched her husband rape her.

M was severely abused by the German mother of two who dragged her across the floor by her hair, slammed her head against the bathroom wall and hit her in the face with a torch.

The defendant and her husband also forced M to undertake chores, take care of the defendant’s son and pray according to Islam which "served the stated goal of the IS, to eradicate the Yazidi faith," the prosecutors said.

The trial judges found that M was bought or sold 15 times and raped by 14 so-called slave owners.

In addition to aiding and abetting genocide, the judges also found Jalda guilty of crimes against humanity and of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity and war crimes.

M told the court that ISIS fighters would undress and inspect the girls and tug the ones they liked by their hair and take them away.

The German woman denied all responsibility and her husband Yunus Emre Sakarya, a Turkish-German citizen member of ISIS, is wanted by an Interpol red warrant.

Sakarya was also involved in the attack carried out by al-Qaeda on the US Consulate in 2012, which killed US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three embassy workers.

M was represented by British barrister Amal Clooney, who said: "My client put her life on the line so that a court would recognise that what happened to her community was genocide.

"I salute my client for her bravery. I thank the German authorities for their commitment to prosecuting the ISIS genocide. And I hope that others will finally start to follow their lead."

From August 2014, the Yazidi community in Iraq and Syria was targeted by ISIS who were intent on exterminating the minority group.

Militants slaughtered the men and older women and then paraded the girls in a market to be sold as sex slaves, eventually forcing the women to marry their captors.

M was one of more than 6,000 Yazidis taken by the group and almost eight years later, nearly 3,000 Yazidis are still missing, while close to 200,000 Yazidis are still living in squalid tents in displacement camps.

These crimes have been recognised by the United Nations, national and international bodies, and, more recently, the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt as amounting to genocide.

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Nadia Murad, who is also a survivor of enslavement and torture at the hands of ISIS, said: “We need to show over and over in every case that perpetrators will not receive impunity and that survivors’ rights matter."

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