A German woman appeared in court on Wednesday accused of complicity in war crimes and genocide with IS in Syria by enslaving a Yazidi woman.
The 37-year-old woman, who has been identified as Nadine K., is also charged with crimes against humanity and having joined a foreign terrorist group. She appeared in court in the city of Koblenz in southwestern Germany.
German authorities believe that in December 2014 the woman and her husband traveled from Germany to the IS-controlled part of Syria where they joined the extremist jihadist group. They eventually settled down with their daughter in Mosul, Iraq, which was then the headquarters of IS.
Rape and ill-treatment
– From early 2016, Nadine K. and her husband kept a Yazidi woman as a slave. The man raped and beat the woman regularly, which Nadine K. knew, the public prosecutor said when charges were brought against the woman in September.
The prosecution believes that the accused woman kept watch to prevent the Yazidi woman, who was then 22 years old, from running away, and that she was forced to do housework and look after children. In addition, she was tried to be forced to convert from Yazidism, the prosecution believes.
In autumn 2016, they are said to have moved to Syria, where they stayed until they were arrested by Kurdish forces in 2019. The Yazidi woman is said to have then been freed.
Persecuted minority
The Kurdish-speaking Yazidis who come from northern Iraq have been persecuted by IS fighters for years.
The Yazidis are a minority group who live in Iraq and several other countries in the Middle East and who have their own religion. When IS controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria, thousands of Yazidi women were held as slaves.
