A German ISIS bride was sentenced today to 10 years imprisonment by a Munich court for the war crime of letting a Yazidi’slave girl’ of five years old die from thirst in the sun.
Jennifer Wenisch, a 30-year-old Lohne woman from Lower Saxony, was convicted of ‘two crimes of humanity in the form enslavement’ as well as aiding in the girl’s murder and being a part of a terrorist group.
Wenisch converted to Islam and traveled to Iraq in 2013 to join the Islamic State. According to court records, they ‘purchased’ a Yazidi girl and child as household slaves.
During the trial, prosecutors stated that the accused’s husband chained the girl outside after she fell ill and wet her bed. The child then died from thirst in the scorching heat.
“The accused let her husband do it and did nothing to save her daughter.”
The sentence she received from the Munich Higher Regional Court is the culmination what is believed to have been one of the first convictions anywhere related to the persecution of Yazidi people by the Islamic State group.
Jennifer Wenisch (30) covered her face as Jennifer was led into the courtroom. She was sentenced for allowing a girl in Iraq to starve to death.
She was found guilty of ‘two crimes against humanity in the form of enslavement’, as well as aiding and abetting the girl’s killing and being a member of a terrorist organisation
After declaring that the child was unable to defend himself and was helplessly exposed to the circumstances, Reinhold Baier, the presided judge, handed the verdict to Wenisch. Wenisch had to consider from the beginning that the child, who was being held in the heat of sun, was at risk of dying.
Taha al-Jumailly is Wenisch’s spouse. The verdict is expected in November.
Wenisch, when asked about her failure to save the girl during the trial, stated that she was afraid her husband would ‘push the girl or lock her up’.
The mother of the Yazidi girl, Nora, has repeatedly testified in Frankfurt and Munich about the pain she allegedly suffered.
The defense had claimed that the mother’s testimonies are not reliable and claimed there was no evidence that the girl, taken to hospital following the incident, actually did die.
Wenisch’s lawyers wanted her to be sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence for supporting terrorist organisations.
According to Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Wenisch claimed that she was being made an example for all the ISIS-related crimes she was convicted of.
In an earlier hearing, Wenisch’s lawyers had called for her to receive just a two-year suspended sentence for supporting a terrorist organisation
Prosecutors wanted Wenisch to serve a life sentence. The defense requested a lighter sentence because there was no evidence that the girl actually died.
Wenisch converted Islam in 2013, and it is believed that she left Germany to join ISIS in the next year. She traveled through Turkey, Syria, and finally to Mosul in Iraq.
She was recruited in mid-2015 to the group’s self-styled hisbah Morality Police and patrolled city parks in IS occupied Fallujah, Mosul.
Armed with an AK47 assault weapon, a pistol, an explosives vest and a pistol, she was charged with ensuring strict IS rules for dress code, public behaviour, and bans on alcohol or tobacco.
In January 2016, she visited Ankara’s German Embassy to apply for new identification papers. She was taken into custody after she left the mission and she was extradited to Germany a few days later.
The trial of Wenisch, which began in April 2019, was one of the first court proceedings regarding the brutal treatment of Yazidis by the Islamic State group.
Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking tribe from northern Iraq. They were targeted and oppressed by the Jihadists starting in 2015.
Amal Clooney (a prominent London-based human right lawyer) was part of the team representing the Yazidi girls mother.
Germany has brought charges against several foreign and German nationals for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed abroad. This was done under the universal jurisdiction legal principle, which allows crimes to be prosecuted regardless of whether they were committed in another country.
Among those who appeared in the dock were a few female suspects.
Nurten J., a German woman, was charged in November 2020 with crimes against humanity while she was living as an Islamic State member in Syria.
In October 2020, another German court sentenced the German-Tunisian wife of a rapper-turned-jihadist to three-and-a-half years in prison for having taken part in the enslavement of a Yazidi girl in Syria.