After the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, overran the traditional homeland of the Yazidi religious minority in northern Iraq in 2014, the men were slain and thousands of women and children were enslaved and forced to serve the radical Islamic group. The court found Nadine K. complicit in her husband’s enslavement of the young woman, whom he received as a “gift.”
The court did not name the victim, but the woman was interviewed by Sky News and was identified as Naveen Rasho. “We saw everything from beating to fear,” she said.
“It is true that she tortured me alone, but as a Yazidi girl when she violated me, she violated all the Yazidis,” Rasho said. “They felt the pain when I was in prison. It is important for all the Yazidis for a Daesh to be placed in prison.” Daesh is an Arabic term for the Islamic State.
According to the court’s verdict, Nadine K. married her husband, a Syrian national, in Germany in July 2013 and converted to Islam. Her husband returned to Syria to work as a doctor, and she followed him in December 2014. Both individuals willingly went to join the Islamic State group, the court said.
They later moved to Mosul, in northern Iraq — and in April 2016, Nadine’s husband brought the enslaved Yazidi woman to live with the family. Since her abduction by the Islamic State in 2014, she had been forced into domestic and sexual slavery. Slaves were often sold or transferred from one owner to another.
During this time, “the man regularly raped and beat the woman, which Nadine K. knew,” prosecutors argued. The judge agreed and found she had in fact enabled and encouraged the sexual abuse. “She could and should have done something,” German broadcaster Südwestrundfunk quoted the judge as saying.
The family only released the woman when they tried to escape from the Islamic State’s last stronghold of Baghouz, an eastern Syrian village, in March 2019, according to the court statement. Kurdish forces detained the family, though the father’s whereabouts are now unknown. Nadine K. was arrested upon her return to Germany in March 2022.
Rasho was able to return to her family in 2019 — almost five years after she was first abducted by the Islamic State group. The court found that she “is still suffering considerably from the consequences of the crimes committed against her.”
Prominent human rights attorney Amal Clooney, who represented the victim, hailed the verdict — the third conviction of its kind.
“We have reached these milestones because of the bravery of survivors, like my client, who were raped and enslaved by ISIS but were determined to face their abusers in the dock,” she said in a statement.
“In this trial my client stared down the ISIS member who enslaved her for three years. And today, she won.”
In November 2021, a court found an Iraqi citizen guilty of genocide and war crimes for the killing of a 5-year-old Yazidi girl at his home and sentenced him to life in prison. In a separate trial, his wife was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the killing.
