German ISIS wife sentenced to 10 years in jail
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Jennifer W., a German member of the Islamic State (ISIS) group, has been sentenced to ten years in jail in Germany for letting a five-year-old Yezidi child die of thirst in Iraq.
In 2015, Jennifer W., a convert to Islam, lived with her husband, Taha al-J, in the western Iraqi city of Fallujah. There, Taha bought a Yezidi woman, Nora, along with her daughter, Rania, and subjected them to what essentially amounted to torture.
ISIS had infamously taken a large number of Yezidi women and girls captive and then bought and sold them as so-called “sex slaves.”
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At one point, Taha made Nora walk barefoot in the courtyard in the scorching heat and only allowed her to re-enter the house after half an hour when her feet were painfully burned.
After Rania wet her bed, Taha had her chained outside in the summer heat without any water. The child died of thirst as a result.
The higher regional court in Munich proved that Jennifer W. did not intervene when her husband had Rania chained up and let her thirst to death, the German broadcaster Tagesschau reported.
The judges also found the defendant guilty of membership in a terrorist organization abroad.
“Jennifer W. played an active part in the enslavement of Yezidis, and stood by as a Yezidi child died of thirst,” Pari Ibrahim, the Founder and Executive Director of the Free Yezidi Foundation (FYF), told Kurdistan 24.
“She is an example of what Yezidi women have been saying all along: female ISIS members were not innocent victims, but some of the most brutal defenders of its ideology,” Ibrahim added.
“While we welcome today’s prosecution, ten years for participation in some of the most horrific crimes is painfully inadequate. The scars borne by Yezidis from these crimes will last not just a lifetime, but generations.”
Jennifer W. traveled to Iraq in 2014 and joined ISIS for ideological reasons, and married an ISIS member.
She was deported from Turkey to Germany in 2016, arrested in 2018, and put on trial in April 2019.