Mother accused of joining Islamic State and keeping woman as a slave

A German mother accused of keeping a young Yazidi woman as a slave after travelling to Iraq to join the Islamic State (IS) was due to go on trial today.

The 37-year-old woman allegedly spent more than four years as a member of the terrorist group and is charged with offences including crimes against humanity and aiding and abetting genocide.

Prosecutors say she left Germany with her husband in December 2014 and stayed in different places in Syria before moving to Mosul in Iraq.

While she is said to have fulfilled the role IS demands of wives – running the household and bringing up their two daughters, who were born in 2015 and 2018 – her husband worked as a doctor and treated fighters.

After their arrival in Mosul, the accused – who cannot be named due to German laws – and her husband allegedly occupied a house whose legal inhabitants had fled from IS or had been driven out by it.

They are said to have set up a reception centre for single female members of IS there.

The husband and wife allegedly not only provided accommodation and food for the women, but also assisted them in marriages or divorces before the Sharia court.

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Prosecutors say they also stored a large number of explosives and weapons, including hand grenades, assault rifles and a pistol in the house.

In April 2016, the woman’s husband allegedly brought a 22-year-old Yazidi woman into their home as a slave.

She is believed to have been previously been captured by members of IS during the storming of her home village in the Sindjar region in August 2014.

She was allegedly enslaved and made available to various IS members who could force her to do household duties and have sex.

The woman is alleged to have been obliged to cook, clean, take care of the animals, feed the accused’s daughters and change their nappies from morning to night.

The husband allegedly regularly raped and beat the Yazidi woman with the knowledge of the accused.

The accused herself allegedly helped ensure her slave could not escape.

Among other things, she is accused of taking the woman’s black clothes, without which she could not leave the house in IS territory.

On 8 March 2019, the accused, her husband, both daughters and the Yazidi woman were allegedly arrested by Kurdish forces during their escape from the last IS stronghold of Baghuz in Syria.

It was only in the course of this escape attempt that the woman’s husband allegedly informed the Yazidi woman, who is said to still be suffering from the tortures she had endured, that she was now “free”.

Since then, the accused and her daughters had been in captivity with Kurdish forces in Syria.

In the course of her re-entry into Germany, she was arrested on 31 March 2022 and has been in pre-trial detention continuously since then.

She was due to appear at a court in Koblenz on Wednesday afternoon for a trial expected to last at least several weeks.

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