A Munich court on Monday convicted a woman married to an Islamic State (ISIS) fighter for “crimes against humanity and attempted war crimes” in the aiding and abetting of the murder of a 5-year-old Yazidi girl, sentencing the woman to 10 years in prison, reports The Associated Press.
The court ruled that Jennifer Wenisch, a 30-year-old German citizen, did not intervene to stop the child’s dying of thirst in the desert heat of Iraq.
The conviction is believed to be the first in the world related to the Islamic State’s persecution of the Yazidi community.
In 2014, ISIS declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria it captured and then forced tens of thousands of Yazidis and Christians to flee their homes or face certain death.
Members of the group also took thousands of Yazidi women captive and massacred thousands of Yazidi men.
German prosecutors said that Wenisch and her husband “purchased” the child and her mother as household “slaves” when they lived in the Islamic State-occupied Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2015.
After the child became ill and wet her mattress, Wenisch’s husband chained her outside their home as punishment and let the child die of thirst in the desert heat. The child’s mother, who was forced to witness her death, was the trial’s main witness, testifying for over 11 days.
The prosecutor had recommended that Wenisch be imprisoned for life. However, the court found that the accused had only a limited ability to end the enslavement of the woman and her child.
The case is being tried in Germany because its legal system incorporates parts of the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Over a hundred German citizens who left the country to join ISIS or other terrorist organizations remain in prison camps in Syria and Iraq. They have petitioned the German courts for permission to return.
Germany has been on a high level of alert due to a series of terrorist attacks in the country in recent years.
In one attack, a 17-year-old Afghani with an axe attacked passengers on a train in Wurzburg before being shot dead by security forces.
In a second incident, an attacker set off a bomb in a restaurant in Ansbach, killing himself and wounding 12 others.
The worst such attack took place in December of 2016, when Tunisian terrorist Anis Amri killed 12 people and injured dozens more when he drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin.
Last October, a 20-year-old Syrian man was arrested in connection with a knife attack that killed one tourist and seriously injured another in Dresden.