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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Court proceedings have begun in Germany against a woman who stands accused of crimes against humanity, membership of a terrorist organization, and the enslavement of a 13-year-old Yezidi girl.
The case against Omaima Abdi, a German-Tunisian, came to court after she was tracked down by a Lebanese journalist.
Abdi is the wife of Dennis Cuspert – one of Germany’s most notorious ISIS jihadists – whom she married while in Syria.
The mother-of-three returned to Europe in 2016 and reportedly worked as an events manager in Hamburg for three years before she was arrested in September 2019.
According to public prosecutor Helmut Grauer, Abdi created online propaganda for the terror group.
Abdi came to the attention of authorities after Lebanese journalist Jenan Moussa gained access to her phone, which was found to contain thousands of ISIS-related files and photographic evidence of Abdi’s life in the former caliphate.
In some of the photographs her children can be seen holding weapons.
“She taught her children the ideologies of the organization,” Grauer told reporters on Monday.
The trial is one of several underway against ISIS women accused of holding Yezidi slaves in Iraq and Syria.
Earlier this month, proceedings began in Frankfurt against a 27-year-old woman – known only as Jennifer. W under German privacy law – who reportedly let a Yezidi child die of thirst in 2015.
The case is said to be the first in the world for international crimes committed against the Yezidi community by ISIS militants.
Human rights organizations have pushed for female ISIS members, often known dismissively as “ISIS brides”, to be recognized as an integral part of the terror organization.
“ISIS women were fully complicit in the torture of Yezidi women and the enabling of their rape by ISIS fighters… these ‘women of the caliphate’ are therefore far from innocent,” Pari Ibrahim, executive director of the Free Yezidi Foundation, said in 2019.
The trial is due to end in July.
Reporting by Zinar Shino
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