That little girl crucified under the sun testifies to the Yazidi genocide

Iraqi Taha al-Jumailly joined the Caliphate holy war between Syria and Iraq in 2013. At trial in Germany he was sentenced to life in prison for letting a 5-year-old Yazidi girl die of thirst

The sentence of the Frankfurt court is important because it fixes a crime in time, prevents it from being too late, with the unnecessary accumulation of years, to be able to experience the suffering made to the victim, to be indignant or to cry. And reality gets too old to be real. Taha al-Jumailly, Iraqi, who in 2013 chose to share the fanatic festival of death and the blasphemy of the holy war of the Caliphate, was sentenced by the German court to life in prison for “genocide, crimes against humanity that caused death , war crimes ». He arrived in Germany in 2019 disguised as a refugee, hoping to hide his past as a jihad fighter and his crimes. For the biography of a murderer this may be enough, for him the irrevocable horrors speak. Behind him, who hides his face in the classroom, is a girl crucified on the bars of a window under the Fallujah sun.

Who her victim was and how she was killed was told by her mother, a Yazidi woman, sold as a sexual object, raped countless times. With her daughter, a five-year-old girl, she had been bought at the slave market in 2015. It was not a hidden place, the jihadists did not hide, they even published regulations governing the sale of Yazidi women. These were the times of the triumph of the Caliphate and the Yazidis, the “devil worshipers”, according to the fierce cosmogony of the fanatics, were in the first place in their projects of purification of the world, because the closest, the most defenseless. They were hunted on the Sinjiar mountain as if they were wild beasts, prey to be sold at the market. The little girl, her mother told the court, had peed, soiling the mattress. “The master,” after beating her, chained her to a window outside the house. The temperature was fifty degrees, the child died after excruciating suffering. This woman was thrown with her baby into the mill of the history of the third millennium, from whose sieve comes the flour of such a bitter bread. Yes, it all happened, so it’s hard to even imagine it. Listening to her story broken, uncertain, in “kurmandji”, one of the Kurdish dialects, the only language she knows, one would cry out that once suffering must no longer exist, one hopes not to have to listen to the words they give it the strength to dip the memory in pain. I do not know if in this case the sentence fulfills the task of an authentic cathartic act. If for this to happen we viewers have to pay such a high price. We got justice, but here we are emptied of a depressed and chilling helplessness, tired and disillusioned with man.

The convict at the time of reading the sentence lost consciousness. This fainting is what we have left of him, less than a shadow. At the bottom of his gruesome parable he was perhaps expecting a confession, a remorse.

The word genocide is to be used with infinite moderation, almost holding it on the fingertips. We must prevent it from losing its meaning, becoming trivial. What relentlessly identifies it is its tragic simplicity. The victim and the perpetrator, the good and the bad, do not get confused even for a moment. People are captured, tortured, enslaved, killed in a bestial way. There is no ideological or religious political tone that shades this ferocious definitive simplicity. So it happened in Iraq. For the first time in Frankfurt the word was applied to the martyrdom of the Yazidis.

In order to judge Al Jumailly, Germany applied the principle of “universal jurisdiction” which gives a State the right to prosecute crimes of this gravity even if they are committed outside the national territory. The massacre and torture of the Yazidis, who in Germany have a large community of exiles, thus enter into international criminal law.

Nadia Murad, the surviving symbol of the Yazidis’ struggle to see their tragedy recognized, has called for the creation by the United Nations of a section of the International Criminal Court to prosecute and judge ISIS crimes. A sort of Nuremberg of jihadism that should also involve the massacres carried out by the provinces of the Caliphate, for example in many African countries. He only got promises.

At the basis of the process is the investigation conducted by a team of the United Nations. More than four hundred ISIS criminals responsible for massacres and enslavement of women and children have been identified with precise testimonies. At least 2,800 would still be in the hands of the militiamen.