A German court has sentenced an Iraqi couple to lengthy prison terms after finding they enslaved and repeatedly raped two young Yazidi girls, aged five and 12, while living under Islamic State rule in Syria and Iraq. The case is the latest in a series of German prosecutions targeting ISIS members for crimes committed against the persecuted Yazidi minority.
Twana HS was sentenced to life in prison, while his wife, Asia RA, received a nine-and-a-half year sentence, following their trial before the Higher Regional Court of Munich. According to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and the court, the pair enslaved the two Yazidi girls between 2015 and 2017, in territory then controlled by the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria. Bild reported that the couple had been arrested by German police in April 2024 and charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
What the girls endured
Prosecutors said Twana HS and Asia RA first enslaved a five-year-old Yazidi girl before later taking a 12-year-old girl as well. Both children were made to work for the couple and run their household, all while being indoctrinated with ISIS ideology and barred from practising their own faith, instead being forced to follow Islam.
According to prosecutors, Twana HS raped both girls on multiple occasions, while his wife supported the abuse, including by preparing a room and applying makeup to one of the girls ahead of the assaults. The court also heard that the couple subjected the girls to regular physical abuse: Twana HS beat the older girl with a broom handle, while Asia RA scalded the younger girl’s hand with hot water. Both children were also repeatedly punished by being forced to stand on one leg for long periods.
Fleeing ISIS territory — without releasing their victims
When Islamic State began losing territory towards the end of 2017, the couple fled the region but did not free the two girls, instead handing them over to other ISIS members. It was not until years later that Twana HS and Asia RA were tracked down and arrested in Germany, with Asia RA detained in Regensburg and her husband apprehended in the town of Roth, both in the southern state of Bavaria.
Court recognises genocide against the Yazidis
The Munich Higher Regional Court concluded that the couple’s crimes formed part of a wider campaign by ISIS to destroy the Yazidi community, and found them guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes on that basis. The Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking minority from northern Iraq who have faced years of persecution by Islamic State militants, who have killed hundreds of Yazidi men, raped women and forcibly recruited children as fighters.
The ruling forms part of a growing body of German prosecutions relying on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows courts to try individuals for serious international crimes committed abroad, regardless of where the offences took place.
A pattern of German prosecutions
This is not the first such case to be heard in Germany. In 2023, a Munich court sentenced a German woman who had joined ISIS to 14 years in prison for enslaving a five-year-old Yazidi girl and allowing her to die of thirst. The defendant, a German convert to Islam identified only as Jennifer W. in line with the country’s privacy rules, had originally been convicted in October 2021 on charges including two counts of crimes against humanity through enslavement — one resulting in death — as well as membership of a terrorist organisation abroad.
She was initially handed a 10-year sentence, but this was overturned by the Federal Court of Justice, which found that judges had wrongly treated the case as a “less severe case” of crimes against humanity and had overlooked aggravating factors. A new sentencing hearing concluded in August of that year with the revised 14-year term, and the court went on to reject her subsequent appeal as “manifestly unfounded.”
The wider toll on the Yazidi community
The United Nations has previously found that ISIS committed genocide against the Yazidis, concluding that the group carried out mass killings, sexual slavery, forced religious conversions and the abduction of thousands of women and children during its 2014 offensive in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that more than 6,000 Yazidi women and children were abducted by ISIS, with many enduring years of sexual violence, forced labour and trafficking. Thousands remain missing more than a decade on, with families still searching for relatives.
Germany has emerged as one of the leading countries prosecuting ISIS crimes against the Yazidis, securing several landmark convictions in recent years for genocide, enslavement and crimes against humanity. The Yazidi community has welcomed these prosecutions, saying they help acknowledge victims’ suffering and hold ISIS members to account even after the collapse of the group’s self-declared caliphate.
