HRW: Baghdad trials for IS wives unfair

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) – A new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) charged that recent trails in Baghdad of women accused of colluding with the Islamic State (IS), were unfair. 

“Iraq’s courts are sentencing the women to life in prison and even to death for non-violent crimes,” read the report, which came out Wednesday.

A Turkish woman was sentenced to death by hanging at Baghdad’s Criminal Court for joining IS, and ten more women from different nationalities were sentenced to life in prison, said Judge Abdul-Sattar al-Bairaqdar in a statement released on Monday. A German teenager recentely received a six year sentence for joining ISIS, and in January, the court sentenced another German female to death on similar charges.

The women are reportedly all former IS wives, aged between 20 and 50 years of age, and were all arrested, many of them with children, in the northern Iraqi cities of Mosul and Tal Afar. 

Under Iraq’s counter-terrorism law, being found guilty of aiding, abetting or having membership in a group classified as a terrorist organization, even if no other crime is suspected, is punishable by a sentence of life in prison, or even the death penalty.

The human rights organization's report continued, “A courtroom observer said that the women’s lawyers contended that the defendants’ husbands or others had tricked them into going to ISIS territory, but maintained that none of the women had been implicated in any violent acts. One woman said in court that her husband took their 2-year-old son and told her to follow him to Iraq or she wouldn’t see her son again.”

Though the prosecution presented no evidence to contradict the women’s statements, the judges found them all guilty and handed them life sentences, according to HRW. The woman sentenced to death was found guilty of knowingly travelling to IS territory to join the group with her husband.

“For those suspected only of membership in ISIS without evidence of any other serious crime, the authorities should consider alternatives to criminal prosecution,” concluded the report. “In these cases, the women are getting the harshest possible sentences for what appears to be marriage to an ISIS member or a coerced border crossing.”