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An Iraqi couple enslaved two Yazidi girls in Iraq, a German court has heard.
Munich’s highest regional court found them guilty of being members of the Islamic State group (IS).
The man, named Twana HS under German privacy laws, has been sentenced to life in prison for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including aggravated sexual abuse of children.
His wife Asia RA was sentenced to nine and a half years in youth detention. The couple were arrested in 2024 in Bavaria.
The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority, have been persecuted by IS since 2014 after the jihadist group took control of large swaths of Syria and Iraq.
Thousands of men have been killed, women and children enslaved and raped as ISIS fighters marched into the Yazidis’ ancestral heartland in northern Iraq.
Germany considers these acts to be genocide. The federal prosecutor’s office accused the two defendants of being part of a systematic campaign by the Islamic State to “exterminate the Yazidi religion.”
Twana HS first came to Germany as an asylum seeker in the early 2000s. He worked as a hairdresser in Munich and had a child. Der Spiegel magazine reported that he was denied asylum but was allowed to stay as a parent of the German child.
Der Spiegel said he returned to Iraq in 2015 after being radicalized at a Munich mosque.
Prosecutors said Twana HS and Asia RA were married under Islamic law and joined the Islamic State between October 2015 and December 2017.
In the year In the fall of 2015, Twana HS bought a five-year-old Yazidi girl as a slave in a Mosul bazaar at the request of his wife.
The couple bought a twelve-year-old Yazidi girl in early October 2017.
Prosecutors said Twana HS “repeatedly molested both children.”
His wife said, “One of the girls did makeup.” They prepared the room for him.
It is alleged that the couple forced them to do housework and childcare and were prevented from practicing their own religion.
The children were sometimes beaten with hard objects.
At one point, Asia RA “scorched her younger daughter with hot water,” prosecutors said.
During the trial, the court heard the harrowing testimony of the eldest Yazidi, who spoke of beatings, forced labor and repeated rapes, BR News reported.
He said the second girl was still missing.
The pair are on trial in Germany under the legal principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows prosecution of alleged war crimes committed abroad, including genocide.
During the trial, Asia RA, now separated from Twana HS, apologized. “I’m sorry,” she said in her final statement.
Twana HS declined to speak in court.
