German EI group sentenced to 10 years in prison for murdering Yazidi girl

Published on : 10/25/2021 – 11:02

Accused in particular of war crimes and murder, Jennifer Wenisch, 30, faced life imprisonment in one of the first trials in the world to prosecute a war crime against the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority persecuted and enslaved by jihadists in Iraq and in Syria.

This German native of Lohne, in Lower Saxony (north-west), had gone to Iraq to join “her brothers”, as she explained during the trial which began in April 2019.

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.

In the summer of 2015, she and her then-husband Taha al-Jumailly, currently on trial in Frankfurt in parallel proceedings, bought a 5-year-old girl and her mother from the Yazidi minority from a group of prisoners in order to to exploit them as slaves, according to the prosecution.

The abused girl died of thirst

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., had been forced to remain in the service of the couple.

Accused of having let her companion do without intervening, Jennifer Wenisch told the audience to have “been afraid” that he “does (her) push or lock him 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.

A version contested by the mother of the child, Nora T., who now lives in hiding in Germany. Key witness, the survivor was heard during the trials of the ex-spouses.

“They will make me an example for everything that happened under IS. It is difficult to imagine that this is possible in a state of law”, had defended Jennifer Wenisch during one of the last hearings, according to statements reported by the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Jennifer Wenisch betrayed herself by confiding in an FBI informant

She was arrested by Turkish security services in January 2016 in Ankara, then extradited to Germany.

But she was not taken into custody until June 2018, after being arrested while trying to reach with her 2-year-old daughter the territories that IS 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.

This trial is one of the first concerning crimes committed against the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority in northern Iraq.

In October 2020, a German-Tunisian, 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 the 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.

>> To see: In Iraq, the long work of identifying Yazidi victims