Even dogs held a higher status than the Yazidi girls: in a genocide trial marked by disturbing insights into the conduct of the jihadist militia Islamic State (IS), the Munich Higher Regional Court on Monday convicted an Iraqi married couple. The husband, Twana H. S., received a life sentence, while his wife, Asia R. A., who was not yet a criminally responsible adult at the start of the offences, was sentenced to nine and a half years under juvenile law.
After nearly a year and a half of proceedings, the court considered it proven that the defendants, who had most recently been living in Germany, enslaved and raped two Yazidi girls while members of IS. One of the former slaves followed the trial in person as a joint plaintiff; during the reading of the verdict, the young woman repeatedly broke down in tears.
Presiding judge Philipp Stoll quoted from the joint plaintiff's witness statement: "We Yazidi women were the slaves — even dogs held a higher status than us." Her entire childhood, she said, had been nothing but suffering. For the second girl enslaved by the defendants, only video testimony was available. In it, she described the treatment as "very cruel."
IS deliberately committed the most serious crimes against members of the Yazidi religious community, which the Federal Republic of Germany classifies as genocide. Judge Stoll said the trial was also about giving effect to international law. The court, he said, had not convicted the defendants as stand-ins for the atrocities of IS as a whole, but for their own individual acts, which took place on Syrian territory.
Both the man and the woman were IS members; the man had already been convicted with legal finality of that membership in an earlier trial. In the current proceedings, the defendants were convicted, among other things, of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes on account of the enslavement and rape.
H. S. was born in Iraq in 1981. He came to Germany in 2002, worked as a hairdresser, and became a father. From 2013 onward, he is said to have been radicalized at a Salafist-leaning mosque in Munich before traveling to Iraq in 2015. There, shortly afterward, he reportedly married his wife, born in 1996, under pressure from her family.
According to the court, at his wife's request the man bought a five-year-old Yazidi girl as a slave at a bazaar in 2015. A twelve-year-old girl was added in 2017. The court is convinced the man raped both children, a finding it considers supported, among other things, by expert opinions. According to the court, the wife assisted in the rapes.
In one instance, she laid out clothes for the twelve-year-old and claimed she should make herself look nice for a wedding, after which the man entered the room and raped the child. According to the court, the woman herself scalded the younger girl's hand with hot water on one occasion, one instance of the repeated torture inflicted on the children.
The young girl was also repeatedly and deliberately pushed beyond her limits and was never allowed to live a normal life for a child. Both victims remain severely traumatized and ill as a result of their enslavement.
The children were not permitted to practice their own religion and instead had to follow Islamic religious rules. As Judge Stoll noted, this makes it the first conviction in Germany for the forcible transfer of victims into another ethnic group, that is, for the forced conversion of Yazidi girls to Islam. As a result, the younger of the two former slaves lost her native language and now needs an interpreter for phone calls with her mother; she has also lost her religion.
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