A Yazidi woman who was sold as a sex slave aged 12 has told a German court how ISIS fighters sneered ‘buy her, she hasn’t been raped yet’ before an extremist ‘owner’ allegedly tortured her and forced her to have sex with him every night.
The now 20-year-old, who is considered a victim in the so-called Yazidi trial, gave evidence before the Higher Regional Court in Munich on Wednesday and repeatedly broke down in tears when she saw the main defendant in the dock.
The presiding judge told her she could interrupt or stop at any time, but she chose to continue and described what had allegedly happened to her between 2015 and 2017 in Islamic State-controlled territory in Iraq.
‘I was bought and sold by six men,’ she told the court. Asked if she could identify the accused as one of them, she replied: ‘I can’t look at them’.
An Iraqi couple, alleged to have been members of the terrorist organisation Islamic State, are accused of buying, exploiting and sexually abusing two Yazidi girls as slaves.
Germany‘s Federal Prosecutor General has charged them with war crimes and crimes against humanity among other offences.
The witness recalled the moment the male defendant decided to buy her. He removed her veil and examined her hair.
The witness recalled the moment the male defendant decided to buy her when she was just 12. He removed her veil and examined her hair.
‘Before he bought me, he looked at me…He and his ISIS friends mocked me, saying, “Buy her, she hasn’t been raped yet.” At the time, she was just a child.
The witness recalled the moment the male defendant decided to buy her, he removed her veil and examined her hair (stock image)
According to the federal prosecutor’s investigation, the girl was sexually abused multiple times.
She said: ‘He got a stick and beat the soles of my feet…he forced me to sleep with him.’
The witness repeatedly broke down in tears when she saw the main defendant in the courtroom.
‘I wished I were dead,’ she added.
The defendant told her: ‘Either I rape you – or I beat you like this.’
During the rapes he would play music described by the victim as ‘ISIS music’.
She had to wash dishes and clean in his household and was raped by the defendant at night. ‘He made me feel like an infidel and that God had willed it,’ the witness said.
The man’s partner is also a co-defendant. She is alleged to have applied makeup to the child before the sexual intercourse.
The young woman belongs to the Yazidi religious minority. The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority, were persecuted by IS after the jihadist group seized large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq beginning in 2014.
Thousands of men were killed and women and children were enslaved and raped when ISIS fighters stormed into the ancestral heartland of the Yazidis in northern Iraq.
The witness stated that he had previously raped a second Yazidi girl he had in his custody, who was even younger.
The defendant had previously lived in Munich for more than ten years as an asylum seeker before becoming radicalized in an Islamist mosque and traveling to Iraq in 2015 to join ISIS.