A German court has delivered a landmark verdict, convicting an Iraqi couple of enslaving two Yazidi girls in Iraq and of membership in the Islamic State (IS) group. The Munich Higher Regional Court found Twana H.S. and Asia R. A. guilty following a trial that brought to light harrowing details of abuse and persecution against the Yazidi minority. The case underscores Germany's commitment to prosecuting severe international crimes under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Twana H.S. was handed a life imprisonment sentence for a range of grave offences, including genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and severe sexual abuse of children. His wife, Asia R. A., who was under the age of 21 when the crimes were committed, received a juvenile sentence of nine and a half years. The couple, who were arrested in Bavaria in 2024, had reportedly left Germany for Iraq in 2015 and joined the Islamic State between October 2015 and December 2017.
Prosecutors detailed how Twana H.S. acquired a five-year-old Yazidi girl as a slave in Mosul in late 2015, reportedly at his wife's request. In late 2017, the couple then bought a twelve-year-old Yazidi girl. Both children were subjected to forced labour, forbidden from practising their religion, and endured severe beatings, sometimes with solid objects. The court heard that Twana H.S. repeatedly raped both girls, while his wife was accused of facilitating the abuse and, on one occasion, scalding the younger girl's hand with hot water.
The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority, faced systematic persecution from IS after the group seized vast territories in Syria and Iraq from 2014 onwards. Thousands of Yazidi men were killed, and women and children were enslaved and subjected to sexual violence when IS fighters invaded their ancestral lands in northern Iraq. Germany officially recognises these acts as genocide, and the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office asserted that the defendants were integral to IS's objective to eradicate the Yazidi religion.
Twana H.S. had first arrived in Germany as an asylum seeker in the early 2000s, working as a hairdresser in Munich. Despite his asylum application being denied, he was permitted to remain as the parent of a German child. He reportedly became radicalised at a Munich mosque before returning to Iraq in 2015. During the trial, Asia R. A., now separated from Twana H.S., expressed remorse, stating, 'I'm sorry' in her final statement, whereas Twana H.S. declined to speak.