The woman watched as her husband, an IS fighter, let a little Yazidi girl die of thirst in the scorching heat of Iraq. The woman has already been convicted for her inaction: the Munich Higher Regional Court imposed a ten-year prison sentence on her in 2021 for crimes against humanity and aiding and abetting murder by omission. But the Federal Court of Justice overturned the guilty verdict in the spring. The supreme German criminal court could not see Jennifer W.’s passive watching of the child’s suffering and death as a “less serious case” than the Munich judges.
So the Munich Higher Regional Court had to negotiate again about the guilt of the accused Jennifer W. On Tuesday, the presiding judge of the 9th criminal senate, Dagmar Illini, announced the verdict: Jennifer W. must be imprisoned for another four years, a total of 14 years. The court thus fell just short of the demand of the federal prosecutor, who had applied for 14 years and six months. Jennifer W. seemed struck, she followed the reasoning with her eyes closed. Across from her sat Nora TB, the mother of the dead girl, wrapped in a shawl.
Mother and child were beaten by the IS man, Jennifer W. did nothing
Jennifer W. converted to Islam in her early 20s, only walked through her hometown of Lohne in Münsterland, heavily veiled, and then left for the IS. There she married an IS fighter, with whom she lived in Fallujah, Iraq – together with a Yazidi woman and her little daughter, who had to work as house slaves. Mother and child were beaten and harassed by the IS man, Jennifer W. did nothing about it. And when the man chained the child to the window as punishment for having wet the bed, in the yard in the shade of more than 45 degrees Celsius, the woman did again: nothing. She was allegedly afraid that her husband might “push” her if she helped the child. The girl died.
In the first trial, Jennifer W. denied a lot: that she held a gun to the grieving mother’s head so that she would stop crying. She also left open whether the child was actually dead and not just taken to the hospital where it had been taken after the crime. Now Jennifer W. admitted: It was true with the gun, she was “emotionally ticked off” and her husband had confirmed that the child was dead.
Judge Illini said it was in the defendants’ favor that she had now confessed and clarified the little girl’s mother about the child’s death. In the first trial, her defense had claimed that the child was still alive, sowing uncertainty and doubt. “She has started to deal with the fact and the consequences and regrets them,” said Illini.
“It won’t bring my child back to me,” says the mother
The argument against Jennifer W. is how inhumanely she treated the enslaved mother and child. Jennifer W. and her husband had forced the two of them to observe Islamic prayer rites, they forced the child to give the child a false Islamic name and the man’s abuse was also partly on Jennifer W.’s initiative. She had complained again and again about the restless child. All of this was inhuman and directed against the religion of the Yazidis.
Also speaking against Jennifer W. is that the mother is still suffering from the act today. You have a post-traumatic stress disorder, treatment is not yet possible. “She doesn’t have a stable perspective on life,” Illini said. After the verdict, the mother told her lawyer that she was pleased with the verdict. “It will not bring my child back to me, but the accused will not find peace.”
On the first day of the trial, Jennifer W. had her lawyer explain that she distanced herself from IS. She said: “I was rightly convicted.” In her last word she cried and explained what she should have done, alone in Fallujah, with her husband. However, it was also revealed during the trial that while she was in detention she tried to secretly smuggle letters to another former IS woman, in which she asked: “Please don’t say anything against me” and warned her about the “cunning of the kuffar”, a derogatory word for “infidel”.
Federal prosecutor Jochen Weingarten had stated that the accused had not helped the child, although she could have been expected to do so. He accused Jennifer W. of “selfish convenience”. She explained that it wasn’t about enslaving the Yazidi women, she just didn’t want to do the housework. The federal prosecutor’s office, on the other hand, sees the enslavement of mother and child as embedded in the genocide of the Yazidis committed by IS.