A German Islamic State member is facing trial for murder after she allowed a five-year-old child who had been enslaved in Iraq to die of thirst.
The woman, identified as 27-year-old Jennifer S., left Germany in 2014 to travel to Iraq where she joined the terror group and worked as a member of the morality police in Fallujah and Mosul, allegedly undertaking her patrols armed and wearing a suicide vest, 20 Minutes reports.
The 27-year-old and her husband are said to have bought the five-year-old and her mother, both of whom came from the persecuted and enslaved Yazidi minority, while in Iraq after they had been captured by Islamic State militants.
Jennifer S. was initially captured in Turkey after trying to have papers signed at the German embassy in Ankara in 2016 and was sent to Germany where she was held until June 2018.
That same year, she attempted to re-enter Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria, but was captured after confessing her actions in Iraq to a taxi driver who worked as an informant.
The prosecutor in the case commented in December when charges were laid, “One day when the little girl was sick, she wet her mattress. The accused’s husband punished her by chaining her outside,” and added that the couple left the girl “to die of thirst in a horrible manner.”
“The accused allowed her husband do nothing and did nothing to save the girl,” the prosecutor said.
Ali Aydin, the lawyer for the accused, spoke about the case to German magazine Der Spiegel and said, “the question is actually whether my client could have done anything” and did not cause the death of the child.
The mother of the child has since fled to Germany, as well, where she now lives and has refugee status.
The trial comes under a year after a similar story in which a Yazidi girl who was enslaved by an Islamic State militant had encountered her captor in Germany as he was posing as a refugee.
Aschwak Hajji, 19, ended up moving back to Iraq after German authorities failed to act on the matter, with her father commenting, “when her mother told me that she met this jihadist, I told her to come back — obviously Germany is no longer a safe place for her.”