An Iraqi member of the Islamic State (IS) group has been found guilty of genocide against the Yazidi religious minority in a landmark German trial.
Taha al-Jumailly was sentenced to life in prison in Frankfurt for offences that included the murder of a Yazidi girl in Iraq. In 2015, the terrorist is accused of enslaving the five-year-old, chaining her up and leaving her to starve to death.
Al-Jumailly is the first member of the Islamic State to be found guilty of genocide against the Yazidis. During the trial, his lawyers argued that the claims were false.
After the terrorist group took huge swaths of land in Syria and Iraq beginning in 2014, the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority, were persecuted by IS. IS soldiers surged into the Yazidis’ ancestral homeland in northern Iraq, killing thousands of males and enslaving and beating women and children.
In 2016, the United Nations said IS had committed genocide against the Yazidi community.
- India hosts talks on Afghanistan, but no Afghan official invited
- Taliban takes on ISKP, its most serious foe in Afghanistan
Al-Jumailly, 29, was said to have joined IS in 2013 and held several roles in the capital of its so-called caliphate in Raqqa in Syria as well as in Iraq. He was arrested in Greece in 2019, extradited to Germany and prosecuted under the international legal principle of universal jurisdiction.
His German wife, Jennifer Wenisch, was jailed for 10 years last month for crimes against humanity, for doing nothing to save the Yazidi girl she and her husband had enslaved.
On Tuesday the court in Frankfurt found al-Jumailly guilty of genocide, as well as crimes against humanity, war crimes and human trafficking. He fainted when the verdict was delivered, temporarily delaying the proceedings.
He killed the five-year-old girl, prosecutors said, because she belonged to the Yazidi minority and he intended to wipe them out.
Under Germany’s international criminal code, a person is deemed to have committed genocide if they have killed, caused serious bodily or mental harm to a member of a group, or moved a child by force, with the intent of destroying “in whole or in part, a national, racial, religious or ethnic group”.