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Joseph Nasra
A German court has imprisoned a former Islamic State (IS) militant for life for involvement in genocide and crimes against humanity against the Yazidis minority in Iraq and Syria, including the murder of a five-year-old Girl.
It was the first genocide verdict against a member of IS, an offshoot of al-Qaeda that conquered large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014 before being ousted by US-backed counter-offensives and its last territorial one in 2019 Schanze lost.
In a seminal judgment, the Frankfurt court found Taha al-Jumailly (29), an Iraqi citizen, involved in the slaughter of more than 3,000 Yazidis and the enslavement of 7,000 women and girls by ISIS jihadists Found guilty in 2014-15.
This included, the court said, the murder of a five-year-old girl whom the defendant enslaved and kneeled to a window so she died in scorching heat in Iraq in 2015.
Al-Jumailly, who covered his face with a file folder, was arrested in Greece in 2019 and then extradited to Germany, where relatives of Yazidis who were killed acted as plaintiffs supported the public prosecutor’s office.
« Today’s verdict is the first worldwide judicial confirmation that the crimes of the Islamic State against the Yezidi religious group are genocide, » said Meike Olszak from Amnesty International in Germany.
The defendant’s German wife, identified only as Jennifer W., was used as a prosecution witness at his trial.
She was sentenced to 10 years in prison last month for participating in the enslavement of the Yezidi girl and her mother.
The Yazidis are an ancient religious minority in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq, known as the Islamic State as supposed devil worshipers because of their beliefs, which combine elements of Zoroastrian, Christian, Manichaean, Jewish and Muslim beliefs.
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