A 30-year-old German woman who left to join Daesh was sentenced to ten years in prison. She was on trial in Munich, Germany, for letting her 5-year-old Yazidi slave die of thirst in the sunlight.
This trial is historic since it is one of the first to judge the crimes committed against the Yazidis. The young woman, 24 years old at the time of the facts, faced life imprisonment. She was charged with murder and a war crime for possessing Yazidi slaves and contributing to the death of one of them.
The community of Yazidis, a non-Muslim Kurdish-speaking minority present in Iraq, was, in 2014, reduced to slavery by the jihadist forces of Daesh. The men were either killed or forced to join the ranks of their persecutors. Women were enslaved and / or forced brides to combatants.
The young slave tied to a window
The accused, Jennifer Wenisch, originally from Lower Saxony, had left Germany for Iraq. She served there in the morality police in Fallujah and Mosul. It was during the summer of 2015 that the accused and her husband, Taha Al-Jumailly, tried in Frankfurt, acquired the 5-year-old child and his mother. Both to serve as slaves to the couple of combatants.
It was Taha Al-Jumailly who punished the child for having urinated in his bed. So he tied the girl to an outside window in the house. The young child stayed there in full sun, under nearly 50 ° C, before dying of thirst. His mother remained a slave to the couple until the latter’s arrest in January 2016, in Ankara.
The child’s mother, a refugee in Germany, has become a key witness in the trial of her former tormentors and her daughter’s murderers. Jennifer Wenisch was therefore judged for her passivity in the face of the agony of the young slave. A passivity that she justified by the “fear” that her husband “pushes her or locks her up”.
Confessions to an FBI Informant
If Jennifer Wenisch was arrested in 2016 by the Turkish authorities, she was not detained until June 2018, while she was trying to reach the Syrian territories under the control of Daesh. During her escape attempt, the accused confided in her driver about her life in Iraq. The latter was actually an FBI informant and their conversation recorded.
The defense of Jennifer Wenisch believes that this trial should not take place, since there was no evidence that the young slave was really dead, the latter having been taken to the hospital in Fallujah. The accused believes that she will serve as an example, a situation that she says is “difficult to imagine” in “a rule of law” like Germany.
Germany has become a land of refuge for many Yazidis who have been able to flee persecution by Daesh.