Federal Prosecutors in Karlsruhe have filed charges against two Iraqi nationals before the State Protection Senate of the Higher Regional Court in Munich. The two, a man and a woman, are suspected of being members of the foreign terrorist organization “Islamic State” (IS), the authority announced on Monday.
The charges were filed on December 9. The accused are suspected of committing genocide, crimes against humanity, including enslavement and torture, and war crimes against individuals, the Federal Prosecutors said. These acts also fulfill the criteria of human trafficking and severe sexual abuse of children. In addition, they are accused of membership in a foreign terrorist organization. The woman is said to have been partly a minor at the time of the crimes.
According to the indictment, the two Iraqis were reportedly married under Islamic law and were members of the IS between October 2015 and December 2017 in Iraq and Syria. On the request of the accused, the man allegedly bought a five-year-old Yazidi girl as a slave on a market in Mosul in the autumn of 2015. In early October 2017, the couple acquired a further, then 12-year-old Yazidi girl, the investigators said.
The man is said to have raped the children multiple times. The woman prepared the room and made up the face of one of the girls, the Federal Prosecutors said. The accused also economically exploited the slaves by forcing them to work and care for children without interruption. The girls were forbidden from practicing their own religion, and instead were forced to follow the Islamic prayers and beliefs of the accused, the investigators said.
Upon the girls’ supposed misbehavior, the accused allegedly reacted with harsh physical violence, regularly beating the girls, sometimes with hard objects. On one occasion, the woman burned the hand of the younger girl with hot water. Before their departure from Syria in November 2017, the accused are said to have handed the girls over to other IS members. All of this served the declared goal of the IS to annihilate the Yazidi faith, the investigators said.
The two accused were arrested on April 9, 2024, and have been in pre-trial detention ever since.