A woman in Germany was sentenced to nine years in prison for keeping a Yazidi woman as a slave, joining a foreign terrorist organization, and other crimes against humanity.

German woman jailed for keeping Yazidi slave https://t.co/1gyPZEImst

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) June 22, 2023

In the western city of Koblenz in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, a court found a 37-year-old German woman, identified only Nadine K, guilty of joining the Islamic State and enslaving and abusing a Yazidi woman for three years while she was in Iraq and Syria. These countries once formed the core territories of the Islamic State. The court also discovered Nadine K encouraged her husband to rape and beat the woman.

"All of this served the declared purpose of IS, to wipe out the Yazidi faith,” prosecutors said when the trial started in January.

Islamic law permits slavery. What will Muslims do to reform Islam?

— Homme Blanc Toxique (@BlancToxique) June 21, 2023

At its height, the Islamic State started a brutal offensive campaign against the Yazidis in 2014, when they attacked their ancestral homeland in northern Iraq’s Sinjar region. They then launched what the United Nations described as genocide against the Yazidi people.

Thousands of men and boys over the age of 12 were given the ultimatum to convert to Islam or die. Those who refused were summarily executed. Meanwhile, around 7,000 women and girls were enslaved and subjected to sexual and physical abuse.

Among them was the Yazidi woman Nadine K and her husband were accused of enslaving in 2016 when the couple moved to the northern city of Mosul in Iraq, which the Islamic State took control of until Iraqi forces and its allies liberated the city in 2017.

Good to see Germany stepping up and prosecuting these crimes. Yet, there’s room for a wider dragnet and the sentences should be significantly higher.

— MA (@Micha28182631) June 22, 2023

A year earlier, Nadine K and her husband traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State and moved back there with the enslaved woman, who was in her 20s at that time.

Kurdish forces later captured Nadine K and her family in Syria in March 2019. She was then repatriated to Germany after being arrested last year.

The Yazidi woman, freed in 2019, appeared in Nadine K’s trial last February and was present when the verdict was handed out to the defendant on June 21st. During the trial, Nadine K denied the allegations that she coerced and enslaved the Yazidi woman, later saying she should have done more for her.

I am lost for words. I wish the victim, who has been through an absolutely horrendous time at the hands of other ‘human’ beings, a happy life. It is so sad that this is not an isolated incident.

— Anna Lane (@AnnaLane140419) June 22, 2023

According to reports by the Associated Press, the Yazidi woman’s lawyer said that her client hopes those who committed similar crimes would be brought to justice. Recently, there have been a number of trials in Germany involving those accused of joining the Islamic State and abusing Yazidi women.

Last October 2021, a woman was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for killing a Yazidi woman she and her husband bought as a slave. A month after the verdict, a German court released a ruling, recognizing the crimes committed by the Islamic State against the Yazidi people as genocide, the first country to do so.