An Iraqi member of the Islamic State (IS) will spend his remaining days behind bars as he has been jailed for life by a court in Frankfurt, Germany in connection with Yazidi genocide.
Taha Al-Jumailly was found guilty of genocide against the Yazidi religious minority, and was sentenced to life for crimes including a Yazidi girl's murder in Iraq, reported BBC. He was also ordered to pay the girl’s mother $57,000, reported Associated Press.
On Tuesday, after Al-Jumailly was found guilty of genocide and the verdict was delivered, he fainted. The court found that Al-Jumailly, who is the first IS member to be convicted of genocide against the Yazidis, enslaved the girl, 5, six years ago, chained her up and left her to die of thirst.
After IS seized large parts of territory in Syria and Iraq starting in 2014, the jihadist group persecuted Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority. When IS fighters arrived in the ancestral heartland of the Yazidis in northern Iraq, thousands of men were murdered and women and kids were enslaved and raped.
Al-Jumailly, 29, reportedly joined IS in 2013, and was arrested in Greece six years later. After being extradited to Germany, he was prosecuted. Last month, his wife, Jennifer Wenisch, who is a German, was jailed for 10 years for crimes against humanity, for doing nothing to save the Yazidi girl who was enslaved by her and her husband.
Prosecutors said that the girl and her mother were bought as slaves in late May or early June 2015 and were mistreated until September 2015 in Falluja, Iraq. Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who was part of the legal team representing the mother, praised her client's "courage" and said that Tuesday's verdict was "the moment Yazidis had been waiting for". She said, "There is no more denying it. ISIS is guilty of genocide."
The ruling was "truly historic" for recognizing the Yazidi genocide, Yazidi activist Natia Navrouzov, who works as the legal advocacy director at multinational NGO Yazda, told DW. She hopes that this case will have a "domino effect and that other countries will follow the example of Germany."
