WASHINGTON — German officials are interrogating an Iraqi couple who are suspected of committing crimes that may amount to genocide while they were associated with the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria between October 2015 and December 2017.
The German federal public prosecutor general released a statement Wednesday saying “Twana H.S. and Asia R.A. are strongly suspected of genocide according to the German Code of Crime” against Yazidis, a religious minority that was targeted by the Islamic State militant group in 2014.
The two, who were not further identified, were arrested this week in Regensburg and Roth County, Germany.
In March, the investigating judge at the Federal Court of Justice issued arrest warrants for them and ordered that “they be placed in pretrial detention.” It has been reported that the couple are originally from the Iraqi Kurdistan region.
Prosecutors said the couple “held a then-5-year-old Yazidi girl; they enslaved a then-12-year-old Yazidi girl as well. Twana repeatedly raped both children. To this end, Asia prepared the room and put makeup on one of the girls.”
Islamic State attacked Yazidis in the Sinjar region in Iraq on August 3, 2014, with a systematic plan to commit genocide against the Yazidis because it considered them to be religious infidels.
According to Yazidi sources, the extremist group killed thousands of people and enslaved approximately 6,500 people, mainly women and children. Mirza Dinnayi, a founder of the nongovernmental organization House of Coexistence in Sinjar, told VOA there are still about 2,650 women and children missing.
IS attacks in Sinjar displaced more than 375,000 people from their homes. After more than nine years, most of them still live in a dozen camps in Iraqi Kurdistan and northeastern Syria.
More than 80 mass graves of Yazidis from Sinjar were found in the region. Half of them have not been exhumed. So far, the remains of 200 of the victims have been identified using DNA technology.
The parliaments of several countries and international institutions, including the U.S., U.K., Belgium, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Armenia and Germany, have labeled the atrocities as genocide.
It is not the first time a court in Germany will try IS members for genocide crimes against Yazidis. On November 30, 2021, a court in Frankfurt found 29-year-old Taha al-Jumailly, an Iraqi national, guilty “of involvement in the slaughter of more than 3,000 Yazidis and enslavement of 7,000 women and girls by IS jihadists in 2014-2015.” The court ruling included the murder of a 5-year-old girl the defendant had enslaved and chained to a window, leaving her to die in scorching heat.
Irfan Ortach, chairman of the Central Council of the Yazidis in Germany, said after the German parliament recognized the “massacre of Yazidis by jihadists from the Islamic State in Iraq as genocide” in January 2023, the perspective of courts in Germany changed on the role of women in the atrocities committed in Iraq and Syria.
Ortach told VOA that “prior to that there was an understanding in German courts that women had no role in the radical organization and its acts. But now they are equally subject of investigations and trials.”
The Regensburg case will likely be similar to the Frankfurt case in terms of the nature of crimes and the ages of the victims.
According to the German federal prosecutor’s office, before leaving Syria in November 2017, Twana H.S. and Asia R.A. handed the girls over to other IS members. Yazidi activists say both girls are now under German authorities’ protection.
This story originated in VOA’s Kurdish Service.
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