Status: 07/27/2022 2:06 p.m
The Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg sentenced an IS returnee to five and a half years in prison on Wednesday.
The State Protection Senate found the 34-year-old mother of two guilty of membership in a terrorist organization abroad, aiding and abetting genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity through enslavement. The court saw it as proven that the woman from Bremen was a member of the terrorist organization Islamic State (IS). She left for Syria in 2014 and was married to several IS fighters there one after the other. With the last man she is said to have kept a Jesidin as a slave and severely abused her. The federal prosecutor’s office had demanded a prison sentence of seven and a half years, and the defense had made no specific request for the sentence.
Abused Yazidi: “I suffered a lot from her”
The Jesidin testified in court two weeks ago. She described how she was repeatedly beaten and raped in IS captivity. The accused also beat her. “I suffered a lot from her,” said the 31-year-old, who is in the witness protection program and appears as a joint plaintiff in the process.
The defendant did not admit the crimes alleged against her in court. She stated that she had traveled first to Turkey and then to Syria out of love for her brother and her future first husband. The Afghan-born German was arrested by Kurdish forces in late 2017 and then spent four years in a prison camp in northern Syria before being taken to Germany. Since then she has been in custody.
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