German officials are questioning an Iraqi couple on suspicion of committing crimes that may amount to genocide between October 2015 and December 2017 in connection with the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.
“Twana HS and Asia RA are strongly suspected of committing genocide against the Yazidis under German crime law,” Germany’s federal prosecutor general said in a statement on Wednesday. The Yazidis are a religious minority who were targeted by the Islamic State militant group in 2014.
The two men, who have not been further identified, were arrested this week in the German counties of Regensburg and Ross.
In March this year, the investigating judge of the Federal Court issued arrest warrants for them and ordered their “pretrial detention.” The couple are reportedly from the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
Prosecutors said the couple “held a Yazidi girl who was 5 years old at the time; they also enslaved a Yazidi girl who was 12 years old at the time. Tewana repeatedly raped both children. To this end, Love Shah prepared the room and put makeup on one of the girls.”
On August 3, 2014, the “Islamic State” attacked the Yazidis in the Sinjar region of Iraq, systematically planning to carry out genocide against the Yazidis because it considered the Yazidis to be religious infidels.
According to Yazidi sources, the extremist group has killed thousands of people and enslaved about 6,500 people, mainly women and children. Mirza Dinnayi, founder of the Sinjar NGO House of Coexistence, told VOA that some 2,650 women and children are still missing.
The IS attack on Sinjar displaced more than 375,000 people. More than nine years later, most of them still live in a dozen refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan and northeastern Syria.
More than 80 mass graves of Sinjar Yazidis were discovered in the area. Half of them have yet to be excavated. So far, the remains of 200 victims have been identified through DNA technology.
Parliaments and international bodies in several countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Armenia and Germany, have called these atrocities genocide.
This is not the first time a German court has tried Islamic State members for genocide against the Yazidis. On November 30, 2021, a Frankfurt court found 29-year-old Iraqi national Taha al-Jumailly guilty of “participation in the 2014 massacre of more than 3,000 Yazidis and the enslavement of 7,000 by Islamic State jihadists” Crimes of Women and Girls – 2015.” The court’s verdict included the murder of a 5-year-old girl who the defendants enslaved and chained to a window, leaving her to die in the sweltering heat.
Irfan Ortach, chairman of the Yezidi Central Committee of Germany, said that after the German parliament recognized “the massacre of Yazidis by the Islamic State jihadists in Iraq as genocide” in January 2023, the German court sentenced the Yazidis The perception of human roles has changed. Atrocities committed by women in Iraq and Syria.
Ortach told VOA, “Before this, there was a consensus in German courts that women had no role in radical organizations and their actions. But now they are also investigated and tried.”
The Regensburg case may be similar to the Frankfurt case in terms of the nature of the crime and the age of the victims.
The German Federal Prosecutor’s Office said Tewana HS and Asia RA handed the girls over to other Islamic State members before leaving Syria in November 2017. Yazidi activists say both girls are now under the protection of German authorities.
This story originated from the Kurdish section of VOA.
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