Munich court gives Iraqi IS couple life and nine-and-a-half years for enslaving Yazidi girls

A German court convicted an Iraqi couple on Monday of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity for enslaving and sexually abusing two Yazidi children. The Munich Higher Regional Court sentenced Twana H.S. to life imprisonment and his former wife Asia R.A. to a nine-and-a-half year juvenile sentence after a trial that lasted more than a year and laid bare the systematic campaign of IS violence against the Yazidi minority.

The monstrous violence is so far from any humanity that it seems unreal.

The verdict marks a further application of Germany’s universal jurisdiction laws to hold IS members accountable for atrocities committed abroad. The court stressed it was judging the defendants for their own acts, not as proxies for the wider crimes of the terrorist group.

The defendants’ path from Munich to Mosul

Twana H.S., 45, was born in Iraq in 1981 and arrived in Germany in 2002. He worked as a hairdresser in Munich and fathered a child. According to Der Spiegel, he was denied asylum but permitted to remain as the parent of a German child. He began to radicalise around 2013 at a Salafist-leaning Munich mosque and travelled back to Iraq in 2015. Shortly after arriving, he married Asia R.A., now 30, under Islamic law at the insistence of her family. Both joined Islamic State between October 2015 and December 2017.

It is not necessary to commit murder to fulfill this offence. Genocide can also be realised when a child of the group is forcibly transferred into another group.

Buying the children

Prosecutors established that in autumn 2015 the man bought a five-year-old Yazidi girl as a slave at a bazaar in Mosul, at his wife’s request. In early October 2017 the couple acquired a second Yazidi girl, aged twelve. The younger child was described in court as having been desired by Asia R.A. as a wedding present, a so-called bride-gift. The older girl was brought into the household, the court found, because the wife preferred a second slave to her husband taking a second wife (a slave could be resold).

The abuse inside a mud house

Both children were held in a mud house on the edge of the Syrian desert and forced to perform household labour and childcare. They were forbidden to practise their Yazidi faith. The man repeatedly raped both girls. On one occasion the wife dressed the twelve-year-old, applied make-up, and told her she was being prepared for a wedding; the man then entered the room and raped the child. Asia R.A. also scalded the younger girl’s hand with hot water. The children were beaten, sometimes with solid objects, and the older girl testified that the man struck the soles of her feet with a stick.

We Yazidi women were the slaves — even dogs had a higher status than us.

Harrowing testimony and a missing child

The older survivor, now an adult, attended the trial as a co-plaintiff and broke down repeatedly as Presiding Judge Philipp Stoll read out her testimony. She described her whole childhood as one of suffering. The second victim’s evidence was presented via video recording; she described the treatment she endured as very cruel. She has not been located and is still missing, according to BR News. After her family ransomed her from IS, the older girl spent years in a refugee camp in northern Iraq.

Sentences and final words

Twana H.S. declined to speak in court. He had already been convicted in a previous trial. Asia R.A. apologised and used her final word to say, "Es tut mir leid" (I am sorry). The court heard 62 days of evidence from spring 2025 before handing down its judgment. Germany formally recognises the IS campaign against the Yazidis, in which thousands of men were killed and women and children enslaved and raped after the group stormed into the Yazidi heartland in 2014, as genocide.

Everything served the goal of IS to destroy the Yazidi religion.