An Islamic State bride on trial for murder and war crimes revealed details of her life to a German security services man who posed as her driver, prosecutors say.
Turkish authorities deported the 27-year-old German woman, identified as Jennifer W. because of German privacy laws, to Germany in 2016, according to an indictment. She was looking for a ride to the Middle East and in 2018 found a man who offered to drive her to Turkey, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
He recorded their conversation. Jennifer is now on trial for crimes that could send her to prison for life, including “membership of a terrorist organization, weapons violation, murder and, specifically, murder as a war crime,” CNN reported.
Jennifer and her husband allegedly bought a 5-year-old Yazidi girl as a slave in the summer of 2015, according to CNN. The girl was allegedly a prisoner of war — ISIS had overrun northern Iraq in 2014 and sold thousands of Yazdi women and girls as slaves. These women were also made subject to ISIS’s sex codes and Quran endorsed rapes, The Times reported.
Jennifer’s husband had tied the child up outside and left her to die of thirst, German authorities allege. “After the girl fell ill and wet her mattress, the defendant’s husband punished the girl by chaining her up outside in the searing heat and leaving her in great agony to die of thirst,” prosecutors said, according to The Times. “The defendant let her husband do as he liked, and took no action to save the girl.”
The child’s mother, who was also allegedly kept by Jennifer and her husband as a slave, is expected to testify in court against Jennifer and is represented by Amal Clooney, an international human rights lawyer. “Our client would like to see justice served, as well as the opportunity to finally give a full account of her suffering and that of her daughter,” one of the mother’s lawyers, Natalie von Wistinghausen, said in a statement.
Jennifer’s husband is a member of ISIS, but officials have not yet identified him, according to German news media reports.
Jennifer explained to her driver her 2014 journey through Turkey, Syria and Iraq to join ISIS. There she became an enforcer for the morality code for women in the Iraqi cities Fallujah and Mosul, prosecutors say.
“Her job was to make sure that women were upholding the terror organization’s dress and behavior codes,” prosecutors said. “To intimidate them, she carried an AK-47 machine gun, a pistol and an explosive vest.”
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