It’s a first. An Iraqi from the Islamic State (IS) organization was tried on Tuesday, November 30, by a German court, “Guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity resulting in death, war crimes and complicity in war crimes”, notably. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
This judgment promises to be historic for the recognition of the abuses committed by the IS against this Kurdish-speaking community: it is indeed the first time in the world that a court has qualified these massacres as “Genocide”, after UN investigators. The reading of the verdict was interrupted just after the announcement of the sentence, the convict having passed out.
Iraqi Taha Al-Jumailly, who joined ISIS in 2013, was convicted of having in the summer of 2015 in Fallujah, Iraq, left a 5-year-old Yazidi girl to die of thirst. he had with his mother “Bought as a slave”, according to the prosecution. For this package, his ex-wife Jennifer Wenisch, 30, was already sentenced to ten years in prison last month for “Crime against humanity resulting in death” of the child.
A campaign to recognize these crimes
The mother of the little girl, Nora B., told the bar the ordeal endured by her child, “Attached to a window” outside the house in high temperatures “Up to 50 ° C”, according to the prosecution. The Iraqi intended to punish the girl, to whom he was inflicting ill-treatment, for having urinated on a mattress.
The Yazidi ethno-religious minority has been particularly persecuted by ISIS, which reduced women to sexual slavery and killed men by the hundreds after jihadists invaded the Sinjar massif in northwestern Thailand. ‘Iraq, August 2014.
The girl’s mother is represented by three lawyers, including the Lebanese-British Amal Clooney. She is leading – with the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, a former ISIS sex slave from the same village as the victim – of a campaign to have these crimes recognized as genocide.