Swarna Shukla –
Published On: December 1, 2021 at 18:20 IST
A German Court jailed for lifetime a former member of the ISIL (ISIS) group after he was convicted of committing genocide against Iraq’s minority Yazidi community. The case involved the death of a five-year-old girl, the member bought as a slave and then chained up in the excruciating sun to die.
The Frankfurt Regional Court sentenced Taha al-Jumailly, a 29-year-old Iraqi citizen, ordered him to pay the girl’s mother 50,000 euros. He was found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity resulting in death, war crimes, aiding and abetting war crimes and bodily harm re resulting in death after joining ISIL in the year 2013.
In a separate trial, Taha al-Jumailly’s wife, 30-year-old German National Jennifer Wenisch, was sentenced to 10 years in jail in October for “crimes against humanity in the form of enslavement”, and helping and abetting the Yazidi girl’s killing by failing to offer help.
The United Nations called the group’s assault on the Yazidi’s ancestral homeland in northern Iraq in 2014 a “Genocide”, saying the Yazidi’s a 400,000-strong community had all been displaced, captured or killed.
According to German Prosecutors, al-Jumailly bought a Yazidi woman and her five-year-old daughter as slaves at the ISIL base in Syria in 2015.
The two had been taken prisoner in northern Iraq at the beginning of August 2014 and were “sold and resold several times as slaves” by the group.
According to the indictment, Al-Jumailly then took the woman and her daughter to his household in the Iraqi city of Fallujah and forced them to live according to strict Islamic rules, while giving them insufficient food and beating them up .
The little girl was tied to the bars of a window in the open sun on a day where the temperatures soared to 50 degrees Celsius as a punishment for wetting the bed. Due to the extreme heat the girl died.
2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad has asked the United Nations Security Council to refer cases involving crimes against Yazidis to the International Criminal Court or to establish a separate tribunal for genocide committed against the community.