A German woman who joined the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq was sentenced Monday to ten years in prison by a court in Munich, Germany, for the murder of a Yazidi girl who was being held in slavery by her and her husband.
Jennifer Wenisch, 30, was convicted of complicity in war crimes and murder. She and her husband let the five-year-old girl die of thirst, chained in the sun, in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2015.
The case is one of the first war crimes trials in the world against the Yazidis, a Kurdish minority persecuted and enslaved by jihadists in Iraq and Syria. Wenisch’s husband, Taha al-Jumailly, is on trial by a Frankfurt court that is expected to announce a verdict next month.
Wenisch denied the charges. Her defense claimed that the girl’s mother was not a credible witness and that there was no evidence that the child, who was taken to a hospital, would have died. The German also said that she was afraid that her husband would punish her if she tried to save the child.
“After the girl became ill and wet her mattress, the defendant’s husband chained him outside as punishment and let the child die an agonizing death from thirst in the scorching heat,” prosecutors said.
The child’s mother testified during the trial and related the torture her daughter suffered.
The trial took place in Germany due to the legal principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows the prosecution of alleged war crimes even if they took place in foreign countries.
According to press reports, the German woman converted to Islam in 2013 and joined the Islamic State in Iraq the following year. She was recruited in 2015 by the ISIS morality police and patrolled the streets of Fallujah and Mosul to ensure that the jihadist group’s standards for dress and public behavior were being followed.
The “ISIS bride,” as Western women who fled to join the jihadist group are called, was arrested in Turkey in 2016 and then extradited to Germany.
However, she was taken into custody only in June 2018, when she was arrested trying to reach the Islamic State-held territories in Syria with her two-year-old daughter, as reported by Euronews. Along the way, she told the driver about her life in Iraq. The driver was actually an FBI informant who recorded the reports.
In 2014, ISIS fighters took over the Yazidi territories of northern Iraq and enslaved thousands of women and children. ISIS atrocities are estimated to have left 10,000 Yazidis dead in the region.
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