The World Briefly
June 23, 2023Three Down …
Germany
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A German court this week sentenced an Islamic State member to more than nine years in prison for enslaving a 21-year-old woman from the Yazidi minority group, the Washington Post reported.
The court found the woman – known as Nadine K. – guilty of a series of charges, including crimes against humanity, aiding and abetting genocide, and sexual violence.
Court documents said Nadine K. and her unnamed husband – a Syrian national – married in Germany in July 2013, when she subsequently converted to Islam. Her husband later returned to Syria and Nadine K. followed him there in December 2014.
That year, Islamic State had taken over the traditional homeland of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq, killing the men and enslaving thousands of women and children. The Yazidi woman – known as Naveen Rasho – was among those abducted and was forced into domestic and sexual slavery.
The court said Nadine K. and her husband willingly joined Islamic State and later moved to northern Iraq. In April 2016, the husband brought Rasho to live with the family, where she was regularly raped and beaten by the man, according to prosecutors.
The court said Nadine K. knew about the abuse and that she enabled and encouraged it.
Rasho was only released in March 2019, when the family fled from the Islamic State’s last stronghold of Baghouz, an eastern Syrian village. Kurdish forces detained the family, though the man’s whereabouts remain unknown. Nadine K. was arrested upon her return to Germany last year.
The Yazidi woman eventually returned to her family, but prosecutors said she “is still suffering considerably from the consequences of the crimes committed against her.”
Rasho’s lawyer, Amal Clooney, hailed the verdict – the third conviction of its kind.
In 2021, another German court found an Iraqi citizen guilty of committing genocide and war crimes for the brutal killing of a five-year-old Yazidi girl at his residence in Iraq in 2015.
The court sentenced him to life in prison. In a separate trial, his wife received a 10-year prison sentence for her involvement in the child’s murder.
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