MUNICH: A Munich court on Monday sentenced a German woman who joined the militant Islamic State group to 10 years in prison over the war crime of letting a five-year-old Yazidi “slave” girl die of thirst in the sun.

The tribunal handed the verdict to Jennifer Wenisch, 30, in one of the first convictions anywhere in the world related to the IS jihadists’ persecution of the Yazidi community.

Wenisch was found guilty of “crimes against humanity in the form of enslavement”, said presiding judge Reinhold Baier of the superior regional court in Munich.

She was also convicted of aiding and abetting the girl’s killing by failing to offer help as well as membership of a terrorist organisation.

“You must have known from the start that a child shackled in the blazing sun would be in mortal danger,” he told Wenisch, who sat impassively as the verdict was read out.

Wenisch and her IS husband “purchased” a Yazidi woman and child as household “slaves”, whom they held captive while living in then IS-occupied Mosul, Iraq, in 2015, the court found.

“After the girl fell ill and wet her mattress, the husband of the accused chained her up outside as punishment and let the child die an agonising death of thirst in the scorching heat,” prosecutors told the trial.

“The accused allowed her husband to do so and did nothing to save the girl.” The proceedings lasted over two years due to pandemic-related delays and other factors.

Wenisch’s husband, Taha al-Jumailly, is also facing trial in separate proceedings in Frankfurt, where a verdict is due in late November. The couple has a young daughter.

According to media reports, Wenisch converted to Islam in 2013 and travelled the following year via Turkey and Syria to Iraq where she joined IS.

Recruited in mid-2015 to the group’s self-styled hisbah morality police, she patrolled city parks in IS-occupied Fallujah and Mosul.

Armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, a pistol and an explosives vest, her task was to ensure strict IS rules on dress code, public behaviour and bans on alcohol and tobacco.

In January 2016, she visited the German embassy in Ankara to apply for new identity papers. When she left the mission, she was arrested and extradited days later to Germany.

Federal prosecutors had called for a life sentence for Wenisch, while her defence team urged a two-year term only on the charge of belonging to a terror group.

Identified only by her first name Nora, the child’s mother repeatedly testified in both Munich and Frankfurt about the torment visited on her child.

When asked during the trial about her failure to save the girl, Wenisch said she was “afraid” that her husband would “push her or lock her up”.

At the close of the proceedings, according to the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, she claimed she was being “made an example of for everything that has happened under IS”.

A Kurdish-speaking group hailing from northern Iraq, the Yazidis were specifically targeted and oppressed by the IS beginning in 2015.

London-based human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who has been involved in a campaign for IS crimes against the group to be recognised as a “genocide”, was part of the team representing the Yazidi girl’s mother.

Published in Dawn, October 26th, 2021