Keeping a Yazidi woman as a slave is among the crimes for which a German woman who joined the Islamic State (IS) group has been jailed for nine years.
According to the BBC, a court in Koblenz found that the 37-year-old had abused the young Yazidi woman for three years while they lived in Syria and Iraq. It also found she had encouraged her husband to rape and beat the woman.
Prosecutors said at the start of the trial in January that ‘(all) of this served the declared purpose of IS, to wipe out the Yazidi faith’.
In 2014, IS fighters stormed into the ancestral heartland of the Yazidi people in northern Iraq. The Yazidis fled to Mount Sinjar, but many were killed and some 7 000 women and girls were seized and enslaved.
The court heard that among them was the young woman, Naveen, whom prosecutors said the accused, named as Nadine K, and her husband used as a slave from 2016, when they moved to the city of Mosul in Iraq.
The couple had travelled to Syria to join IS a year earlier and later moved back there with the woman, who was in her early 20s at the time.
In March 2019, Nadine K and her family were captured by Kurdish forces in Syria. She was arrested last year after being repatriated to Germany.
During her trial, the accused denied coercing the Yazidi woman but said she should have done more for her.
The victim, who was freed in 2019, testified in Nadine K’s trial in February and was present for Wednesday’s verdict.
According to Associated Press, her lawyer said the woman hoped that all of those who had committed similar crimes would be brought to justice.
[Image: Naveen, the 22-year-old Yazidi woman for whose enslavement and abuse Nadine K has been jailed, from an interview with Sky News]