A court in Baghdad on Sunday convicted 11 Turkish women and one from Azerbaijan of joining the Islamic State (ISIS). One of them was sentenced to death, while the others were given life in prison.
The women claimed they were tricked by their husbands or forced to join ISIS. The woman sentenced to death by hanging is the only one who admitted she willingly joined the Islamic State in Iraq, although she said she came to regret her decision.
“We had to leave Turkey because my husband was a wanted man. I wanted to live in an Islamic state where sharia is the law of the land,” the woman said.
Most of the defendants argued they were not involved in the Islamic State’s activities, but the court referred to them as “terrorists” nonetheless. Article 4 of Iraq’s anti-terrorism law calls for penalties against “any person who commits, incites, plans, finances or assists in acts of terrorism,” and is strict against people who illegally enter the country for those purposes.
The woman from Azerbaijan said she met her husband online and thought they would be living together in Turkey, but instead he took her to Islamic State territory in Syria and Iraq. Another defendant said she was forced to follow her husband to Iraq because he took their two-year-old son with him. “I didn’t take part in any violent action. I stayed at home the whole time,” she claimed.
The women convicted on Sunday ranged from 20 years to 50 years of age. Iraqi authorities arrested them in the cities of Mosul and Tal Afar after their husbands died fighting Iraqi forces. The woman sentenced to death wept when her sentence was handed down, while one of the other defendants reportedly fainted. Several of the women tended to small children while they were in court.
“A judicial source said the sentencing of the women by a three-judge panel had followed weeks or even months of questioning. They have one month to lodge an appeal,” the Rudaw news agency reports.
An Iraqi court also sentenced a German teenager identified as “Linda W” to six years in prison on Sunday for her involvement with ISIS. Linda, 17, has said she ran away from home in 2016 after online extremists persuaded her to convert to Islam and make her way to Syria, where she married an Islamic State jihadi recruited from Chechnya. She was arrested in Mosul after Iraqi forces recaptured the city.
“I don’t know how I came up with such a dumb idea. I’ve completely ruined my life,” she said in a televised interview after her arrest.
Deutsche Welle suggests there is some discomfort with Linda W’s sentence in Berlin, as she was tried behind closed doors in a juvenile court, and her verdict “could not immediately be independently verified by authorities in Germany.”
Another German woman was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court in January for traveling to Islamic State territory with her two children and “offering logistic support and helping the terrorist group to carry out criminal acts.” Hundreds of other foreign women are said to be in Iraqi custody and awaiting trial for joining the Islamic State.
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