Islamic State bride left Yazidi child chained in the sun to die of thirst

An Islamic State bride was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity on Monday over the killing of a five-year-old Yazidi girl who was chained in the sun to die.

Jennifer Wenisch, a 30-year-old German convert to Islam, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

She is one of the first people to be convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity over Islamic State’s campaign of genocide against the Yazidis.

She was found guilty of enslaving a Yazidi woman and her five-year-old child, and of standing by and doing nothing while her husband chained the girl in the sun as punishment for wetting the bed.

The murder took place in the Iraqi city of Fallujah and the child was exposed to temperatures over 50C.

“The victim was defenseless and helpless,” said Judge Joachim Baier said as he pronounced sentence. “You had to expect from the start that the child, who was tied up in the heat of the sun, was in mortal danger. But you did nothing to help, although it was possible and reasonable.”

Wenisch was also found guilty of threatening to shoot dead the girl’s distraught mother as she wept for her child.

Wenisch converted to Islam in 2013 and travelled to Iraq where she joined IS and married Taha al-Jumailly, an Iraqi member of the group. 

The court heard how Jumailly did not unchain the child until she had passed out. The couple then took her to hospital.

But the girl’s mother, identified only as Nora, testified that she never saw her daughter again.

Wenisch was found guilty as an accessory to murder and to a war crime, and of two counts of crimes against humanity for enslaving the two Yazidis.

The court found that by her membership of IS she supported its “enslavement of the Yazidi people” and attempted “destruction of the Yazidi religion”.

“You were aware of the goals and deeds of IS when you left for Iraq to join the organization,” Judge Baier said. 

Wenisch looked shocked when the verdict against her was read out. She looked first to her lawyer for help then to the ceiling.

She had claimed in her testimony that she was powerless to prevent the murder of the child, because as a woman she could not defy her husband under IS rule.

She apologised for her actions, but she also accused the court of making her a scapegoat for all IS cimes in a highly unusual closing statement before the verdict, claiming: “The presumption of innocence does not apply in my case”.

Wenisch was tried in her native Germany under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which holds that war crimes and crimes against humanity can be prosecuted anywhere regardless of where they were committed.

She testified against her former husband in his ongoing separate trial over the same incident earlier this year.

Jumailly was extradited to Germany after being held as a migrant in Greece. He faces charges of attempted genocide over the killing of the Yazidi girl, as well as murder, human trafficking and membership of a terrorist organisation. 

A verdict in his trial is expected next month.

Wenisch was the first person to be indicted for crimes against humanity over the IS campaign against the Yazidis when her trial began in 2019.

At the time Nadia Murad, the Yazidi survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, commented: "Every survivor I spoke to is waiting for one and the same thing: that the perpetrators will be prosecuted and brought to justice for their actions against the Yazidis, especially against women and children.”