Today, Tuesday, a German court sentenced an Iraqi ISIS member to life imprisonment after convicting him of the crime of genocide against a Yazidi girl, in a ruling that is the first of its kind in the world.
Frankfurt court judges considered Taha al-Jumaili "guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity that led to death," and sentenced him to life imprisonment and ordered him to pay 50,000 euros ($57 thousand) to the girl's mother.
The German news agency (dpa) quoted Judge Christoph Koehler as saying that this is the first conviction in the world regarding the role of a person in the systematic persecution by ISIS of the Yazidi minority.
It is expected that this ruling will be essential in recognizing the atrocities committed by ISIS against this Kurdish-speaking minority, which amount to "genocide" as previously described by UN investigators.
The recitation of the verdict stopped shortly after the sentence was pronounced, as the accused fainted.
The defendants' lawyers have denied the allegations against their client.
Lawyers for the accused denied the allegations against their client (European)
Al-Jumaili, who joined the ranks of the Islamic State in 2013, was convicted of letting a five-year-old Yazidi girl die of thirst in the summer of 2015 in Fallujah, Anbar Governorate, western Iraq, after he bought her with her mother, "Kasbeya", at an ISIS site in Syria in 2015, according to what a source said. claim.
Al-Jumaili was arrested in Greece and extradited to Germany two years ago.
Under the same charge, his ex-wife Jennifer Fenech was sentenced to 10 years in prison last month after being found guilty of a "crime against humanity that led to the death of the child".
The mother of the girl, who survived captivity and is the main witness before the court, recounted the tragedy that her daughter suffered while she was chained to bars on a window outside the house, in the heat "sometimes reaching more than 50 degrees Celsius," according to the Public Prosecution Office.
After being constantly mistreated with inadequate food and regularly beaten to punish, according to the indictment, the girl was "punished" for urinating on her bed, and died of punishment.
The girl's mother is represented by 3 lawyers, including the Lebanese-British lawyer Amal Clooney, who, along with the Yazidi Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad and one of the group's captives, headed a campaign to recognize these crimes as genocide.
About 1,200 Yazidis were killed, and more than 6,000 were kidnapped and enslaved during the ISIS takeover of the city of Mosul in 2014, and the United Nations described the organization's attack on the Yazidis as a genocide.
It is noteworthy that the Yezidis are a group that embraces a mystical religion, most of its members live near Mosul and the Sinjar Mountains region, while smaller groups live in Turkey, Syria, Iran, Georgia and Armenia.