The woman, known only as Nadine K, was also jailed for aiding and abetting war crimes as a member of ISIL.
A German court has sentenced a woman to more than nine years in prison for enslaving a Yazidi woman as well as aiding and abetting war crimes and genocide as a member of ISIL (ISIS).
The 37-year-old German defendant, identified only as Nadine K, was also found guilty of crimes against humanity and membership of a foreign terrorist organization, a spokesman for the court in the western city of Koblenz said.
The defendant was a member of ISIL between December 2014 and March 2019, having traveled to Syria to join the group with her husband.
In 2015, the couple moved to Mosul, Iraq, then back to Syria.
Since April 2016, the couple has been enslaved by a Yazidi woman who has been held captive by ISIL since 2014.
Nadine K watched over the then 22-year-old woman to prevent her from escaping and forced her to do housework and observe strict Islamic rituals.
According to the defendant, Nadine K’s husband regularly raped and beat the Yazidi woman.
“All of these served as the stated objective of IS (Islamic State/ISIL), to wipe out the Yazidi faith,” prosecutors said at the opening of the trial earlier this year.
Nadine Kay and her family are believed to have taken the woman with them in 2016 when they returned to ISIL-controlled areas of Syria where they remained until March 2019.
The Yazidi woman was eventually released after Kurdish fighters captured the family.
The defendant returned to Germany in one of several repatriation operations last year and was arrested on arrival.
In October 2021, ISIL member Jennifer Wenisch was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a Munich court for the death of a 5-year-old Yazidi girl whom she and her husband enslaved, who was chained under the hot sun and starved to death. .
Wenisch was also convicted of being part of a radical group, but most of the sentence related to the girl’s death.
In May 2022, Leonora Messing, another German woman who joined ISIL, was acquitted of slavery charges involving a Yazidi woman in Syria, but was found guilty of being a member of ISIL. Messing traveled to Syria at the age of 15 and was given a two-year suspended sentence.
In January, Germany’s lower house recognized the massacre of Kurdish-speaking Yazidis by ISIL in 2014 as genocide, condemning the “unspeakable atrocities” and “atrocious injustices” carried out by ISIL fighters “with the intention of completely wiping out the Yazidi community”.
After taking over large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014, ISIL killed more than 1,200 Yazidis, enslaved 7,000 Yazidi women and girls, and displaced most of the 550,000-strong community in northern Iraq from their homes.
In November 2021 a German court issued the world’s first ruling to recognize crimes against the Yazidi community as genocide, in a ruling that was hailed by activists as a “historic” victory for the minority.
About 150,000 Yazidis now live in Germany.
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