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Jihadist’s wife sentenced in Germany for enslaving Yazidi girl

A German court sentenced the wife of rapper-turned-jihadist to three and a half years in prison for having taken part in the enslavement of a Yazidi girl in Syria.

Published: 2 October 2020 15:53 CEST
Jihadist's wife sentenced in Germany for enslaving Yazidi girl
Omaima A. in a Hamburg court in May. Photo: DPA

Named by the court as Omaima A., 36, the German-Tunisian woman was found guilty of belonging to the Islamic State (IS) group by a regional court in Hamburg.

The judges also found her in violation of her duty as a mother by taking her three small children to a war zone, and of a war weapons control act for use of a Kalashnikov rifle.

Early in 2015, the woman and her three children joined her first husband in IS-controlled areas in Syria.

After his death, she married a notorious Berlin gangster rapper who had joined the ranks of the jihadist group.

The rapper Denis Cuspert, better known under his pseudonym “Deso Dogg”, had joined IS in 2014. According to media reports, he was killed during an air attack in 2018 in Syria.

The judges found the defendant to be complicit in the enslavement of a 13-year-old girl from the Yazidi minority community.

In the trial, Omaima A. said that she “made a serious mistake five years ago”, public broadcaster NDR reported, when she joined her first husband in Raqqa, then the capital of IS in Syria.

She claimed that the Yazidi girl was a “guest” in their house.

READ ALSO: Widow of German rapper turned IS fighter arrested in Hamburg

“I apologise to her for not having been able to help her,” the woman said.

But the public prosecutor's office said that she had never truly broken with the jihadist organisation.

Her lawyer argued that she had been content to maintain the home and look after her children without supporting the militant actions of her two husbands.

Two other trials are being held in Germany in connection with abuses committed against the Yazidis.

A German woman has been in the dock since April 2019 for war crimes and murder, accused of having left a five-year-old Yazidi girl dying of thirst in Iraq.

Linked to the same crime, an Iraqi man has been on trial since last April in Frankfurt for murder and genocide, reportedly unprecedented against a member of IS.

The Islamic State group committed atrocities against the Yazidis in 2014 that are being investigated by the UN to determine whether they can be qualified as genocide.

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IS

France charges jihadi with murder in IS territory

France on Friday charged a man with murder days after his expulsion from Turkey, holding him in custody over crimes alleged to have taken place in jihadist-controlled areas of Iraq and Syria.

Published: 10 October 2020 08:57 CEST
France charges jihadi with murder in IS territory
People walk under a billboard erected by the Islamic State (IS) group as part of a campaign in the IS controlled Syrian city of Raqqa in 2014. Photo: Raqa Media Center / AFP
Using the pseudonym “Abou Salman al Faransi”, 26-year-old Othman Garrido is believed to have arrived in the region in 2012, where anti-terror prosecutors (PNAT) say he committed “murder in connection with a terrorist undertaking” and joined a “terrorist conspiracy”.
   
He is believed to have played an important role in and have information on the French jihadist scene.
   
A judge on Friday ordered him jailed provisionally after he spent the week in police custody.
   
“Based on photographs of abuses where he is visible”, Garrido “was likely involved in other murders in Iraq and Syria” being probed in a separate investigation, PNAT said.
 
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Prosecutors suspect him of three murders in total, although they have not been able to precisely date the crimes.
   
France has had an arrest warrant out since 2016 for Garrido, a native of southern city Montpellier.
   
Turkish forces captured him near the Syrian border in July, and handed him over under a Paris-Ankara deal covering the return of French jihadists.
   
A youth court sentenced Garrido in 2017 to 15 years in jail for joining the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, where he trained and fought as well as attempting to incite violence by French Muslims.
 
   
After burning his French passport, Garrido urged Muslims to kill “infidels” in a seven-minute video distributed by IS' communications arm in 2014.
   
He was flanked in that recording by two other French jihadists using the pseudonyms Abou Ousama al Faransi and Abou Maryam al Faransi.   
 
Garrido's parents and two of his brothers have also received jailed sentences of 10 and 15 years. It is unclear whether his brothers, who also travelled to Syria, remain alive.
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