First modification:
This Tuesday, November 30, a Frankfurt court sentenced Taha al-Jumailly, a member of the jihadist group Islamic State, to prison for life who left a Yazidi girl he had enslaved in northern Iraq to die of thirst. It is the first verdict in the world that recognizes the genocide of that minority.
This Tuesday, a court in Frankfurt, Germany, sentenced a member of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) to life. Taha al-Jumailly, a 29-year-old Iraqi, was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and human trafficking.
Judge Christoph Koller also found it proven that the defendant murdered a five-year-old Yazidi girl, whom he chained to a window, leaving her to die of thirst in scorching heat in 2015. Prior to this, he had enslaved her in northern Iraq. The defendant’s attorney had tried to prove that it was an accident.
Al-Jumailly, who entered the court with a file folder covering her face, lost consciousness after the court handed down the sentence. In addition to having to serve a life sentence, he will have to pay the girl’s mother an indemnity of 50,000 euros.
Meike Olszak, an international law expert at Amnesty International, said that “today’s ruling marks the first worldwide confirmation by a court that the Islamic State’s crimes against the Yazidi religious group are genocide.” This is the first genocide verdict against an IS member.
For his part, the vice president of the Kurdish Community of Germany (KGD), Mehmet Tanriverdi, declared in a statement released by the organization that “today’s sentence must be understood as a sign against terror and its supporters.”
At the end of October, the German Jennifer W., wife of the convicted man, was sentenced in Munich to ten years in prison for refusing to help the little girl and for participating in the slavery of the Yazidi girl and her mother.
Al-Jumailly was arrested in Greece in 2019 and extradited to Germany. However, the trial began in 2020, under the principle of universal justice. This, because neither the perpetrator nor the victim are German citizens.
The girl’s mother, Nora T, and the relatives of the murdered Yazidis testified as witnesses to the harassment for which Al-Jumailly was accused.
The horrors perpetrated by the Islamic State
The events occurred in the summer of 2015 in Fallujah, Iraq. At the time, that city was controlled by the so-called Islamic State (IS), the jihadist group that seized large swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014, until it was overthrown by US-backed counteroffensives.
According to the United Nations (UN), IS participated in the massacre of more than 3,000 Yazidis and enslaved 7,000 women and children belonging to the Kurdish-speaking religious group between 2014 and 2015. Many of them remain missing. The same organization blames them for the displacement of most of the 550,000-member Yazidi community.
The Yazidis are an ancient religious minority in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq. Their faith includes a mixture of Zoroastrian, Christian, Manichean, Jewish, and Muslim beliefs. In effect, the Islamic State considered them devil worshipers.
With EFE and Reuters
.