An Iraqi couple was arrested in Germany on suspicion of genocide and crimes against humanity for enslaving two Yazidi girls, Reuters cited federal prosecutors on Wednesday.
The two alleged members of the Islamic State (ISIS) group, Twana H. S. and Asia R. A., were arrested on Tuesday for their treatment of the girls between 2015 and 2017 in Iraq and Syria.
The girls were repeatedly raped, physically abused and banned from practicing their religion, the prosecutors said. When the arrested couple left Syria in November 2017, they gave the two girls to other ISIS members.
“All of this served the organisation’s objective to destroy the Yazidi religion,” they added.
Germany has been at the forefront of recognising the crimes committed by ISIS against the Yazidi community. The Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, voted in early 2023 to recognise the 2014 massacre by ISIS in Iraq’s Sinjar region as genocide against the Yazidi people.
Similarly, a German ruling in 2021 saw a former ISIS member sentenced to life in prison for their involvement in genocide and crimes against humanity against Yazidis.
More than 6,000 Yazidis were abducted when ISIS overran the community’s heartland of Shengal (Sinjar) in 2014. Around 2,700 remain missing.
A special report by Amberin Zaman for Al-Monitor on 20 July 2023 highlighted the experiences of Yazidi women who were part of Operation Sonderkontingent, a $106 million scheme involving the transfer of 1,100 Yazidi women and child victims of ISIS to Germany in 2015 and 2016. The operation was overseen by Michael Blume, a state official from Baden-Württemberg, who described the program as a “great success”. Despite the enormous challenges faced by the Yazidi people, the report detailed how the community is now thriving in Germany.
