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Frankfurt (AFP) – An Iraqi member of the jihadist organization Islamic State (IS) was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison for “genocide” against the Yazidi minority by a German court, the first such sentence anywhere in the world.
The judges of the Frankfurt Regional Court recognized Taha al Jumailly, 29, “guilty of genocide, a crime against humanity that caused deaths, a war crime and complicity in war crimes.”
The reading of the verdict was interrupted because the defendant fainted just after hearing the sentence.
Historic moment
It is the first time in the world that a court has judged IS violence against this Yazidi Kurdish minority as “genocide”, although UN investigators have already qualified it in those terms.
“This is a historic moment for the community,” Natia Navruzov, a lawyer and member of the NGO Yazda, who has gathered evidence of crimes committed by IS against Yazidis, told AFP.
“It is the first time in Yazidi history that a perpetrator (of crimes) has been before a court on charges of genocide,” he added.
Iraqi Taha Al-Jumailly, who joined ISIS in 2013, has been responding since April 2020 to charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and human trafficking.
According to the indictment, in the summer of 2015 in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Al-Jumailly let a five-year-old Yazidi girl die of thirst whose mother had “bought as a slave.”
In this case, his ex-wife Jennifer Wenisch, 30, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in October for a “crime against humanity causing the death” of the girl.
The mother of the minor, Nora B., told the court the ordeal her daughter experienced, “tied to a window” outside the house in extreme heat, according to the prosecution.
The defendant, currently 29 years old, abused the minor to punish her for having urinated on a mattress.
Multiple violations
The mother, an illiterate woman who speaks Kurmanyi, a Kurdish language, claimed to have been raped multiple times by IS jihadists after they invaded her village on Mount Sinjar in northwestern Iraq in August 2014.
The Yazidi minority has been viciously persecuted by ISIS, which forced its women into sexual slavery and killed hundreds of men.
The mother of the deceased girl is represented by three lawyers, including the Lebanese-British Amal Clooney, who leads together with the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Nadia Murad (IS sex slave and from the same village as the victim ), a campaign to recognize crimes against Yazidis as genocide.
To try the Iraqi, detained in Greece in 2019 by an international arrest warrant, Germany applies the principle of “universal jurisdiction”, which allows a state to prosecute the perpetrators of serious crimes even when they are committed outside its territory.
For this reason, this process sends “a clear message: no matter where crimes are committed and where their perpetrators are, thanks to universal jurisdiction, they cannot hide,” said Natia Navruzov.
Germany, where a large Yazidi diaspora lives, is one of the few countries that has agreed to prosecute the abuses committed by IS against this minority.
Justice has already issued five convictions for crimes against humanity of women linked to this community in territories conquered by the IS.
In May, a team of UN investigators announced they had collected “clear and convincing evidence” that jihadists committed genocide against Yazidis.
Nadia Murad then demanded that the UN Security Council resort to the International Criminal Court or create a specific court for the “genocide” committed against her community.
© 2021 AFP
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Justice recognizes for the first time the Yazidi genocide with the sentence against an Iraqi in Germany