It is one of the first trials in the world to prosecute a war crime against the Yazidis. This Monday, German justice delivers its verdict against a former member of Daesh accused of letting a girl die of thirst. Reduced to slavery in Iraq, the little one belonged to the Yazidi community, a Kurdish-speaking minority persecuted and enslaved by jihadists from 2014. After two and a half years of proceedings, this German accused in particular of war crimes and murder, Jennifer Wenisch, 30 years, faces life imprisonment.
Originally from Lohne, in Lower Saxony (north-west), she had gone to Iraq to join “her brothers”, as she explained to the bar of the Munich court. For several months, she patrolled there, armed, within the morality police in Fallujah and Mosul. This force notably ensured respect for the rules of dress and behavior set by the jihadists.
Dead woman tied to a window in the sun
In the summer of 2015, she and her then-husband Taha Al-Jumailly, currently on trial in Frankfurt in parallel proceedings, bought a five-year-old girl and her mother from the Yazidi minority from a group of prisoners in order to exploit them as slaves, according to the prosecution.
After numerous mistreatments, the little girl was “punished” by the husband of the accused for having urinated on a mattress, then tied, in temperatures around 50 ° C, to a window outside the house. The girl died of thirst while her mother, Nora T., was forced to remain in the service of the couple.
“They will make an example of me”
The prosecution accuses Jennifer Wenisch of having let her companion do it without intervening. Asked during the trial about her passivity, she, in one of her rare statements, claimed to have “been afraid” that he “would push or lock her up”. Her lawyers, like those for Taha Al-Jumailly, tried to suggest that the girl, later taken to a hospital in Fallujah, may not have died, an unverifiable fact. They pleaded for a suspended prison sentence for their client, arguing that she had only “supported” Daesh.
A version contested by the mother of the child, Nora T., who now lives in hiding in Germany. Key witness, the survivor delivered her version during the trials of the ex-spouses. “They will make me an example for everything that happened under ISIS. It is difficult to imagine that this is possible in a rule of law ”, defended Ms. Wenisch during one of the last hearings, according to remarks reported by the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Many Yazidis refugees in Germany
She was arrested by Turkish security services in January 2016 in Ankara and then extradited to Germany. But she was not taken into custody until June 2018, after being arrested while trying to reach with her two-year-old daughter the territories that Daesh still controlled in Syria. It was during this attempt that she told her driver about her life in Iraq. The latter was actually an FBI informant who drove her in a car equipped with microphones. The prosecution used these tapes to indict him.
In October 2020, a German-Tunisian woman, wife of a jihadist, was sentenced by a German court to three and a half years in prison for having notably contributed to reducing a young Yazidie to the status of a slave when she was staying in Syria.
The small Yazidi ethno-religious minority has been particularly persecuted by jihadists, who reduced their women to sexual slavery, forcibly recruited child soldiers and killed men by the hundreds. Non-Arab and non-Muslim Iraqis, many Yazidis have found refuge in Germany, especially in the southwest of the country, where women and their children, victims of repeated rape, have been taken care of and treated.