British Islamic State terror suspects to face female judges
The Islamic State defendant had clearly expected to face judgement from a man. So when the petite, high-heeled and unveiled blonde took her place at the front of the courtroom in northeastern Syria, he quickly averted his eyes.
“It’s considered haram in ISIS’s version of Islam to look a strange woman in the eye,” Judge Amina told the Telegraph from her office just off the court, laughing as she recalled the suspect’s discomfort.
“Perhaps it has been years since he saw a woman like me,” said Amina, who asked to be identified only by a first name for her security. “I ordered him three times to look at me, but he refused. He just stared at the ground for the whole trial.”
Amina is one of half a dozen judges sitting at a special terrorism court near the city of Qamishli, in the autonomous Kurdish region of Syria known as Rojava.
The Kurds, which established a breakaway administration in 2013, have built a justice system from scratch based on Rojava’s secular, socialist-influenced constitution, without any recognition from the Syrian government or the outside world.
So far they have tried only locals – 6,000 of them in total – but on Thursday it was announced they would begin hearing the cases of foreign suspects too.
The Kurds have for years bore the responsibility for terrorists who came from all over the world to fight with Isil. Their governments have refused responsibility for them, so they languish in prisons and camps across the north-east.
Desperate to win legitimacy for their fledgling state, the Kurds have abolished the death penalty, which is still legal under Syrian state law, and offered reduced sentences to Isil members who hand themselves in.
The allegations some of the suspects are facing are serious – crimes against humanity, genocide, the rape and enslavement of the minority Yazidi people, mass murder and kidnapping.
The harshest sentence she can pass is life in prison, which translates to a 20-year sentence. This is usually reserved for what she calls the “top-tier jihadists”; the emirs, leaders and frontline fighters.
In the “second-tier” category, which includes those who worked Isil’s sharia or military administration, she usually passes a sentence of one-two years. The third tier are those she considers to have been “forced” to work for Isil for money, who are not ideologically driven and served in menial roles. For those, more often than not she lets them go free.
She can see as many as five suspects a day, she says. Few appear to have any legal representation.
Amina, who is 47 but looks half her age, wonders whether prison is the answer for the most serious offenders.
“These people are a danger to the whole world and I don’t think the answer is prison,” she told the Telegraph during a visit last year to Rojava. “Prison will not change people who think it is OK to rape and enslave a Yazidi woman, to kill her if she does not obey.”
The detention centres of north-east Syria are overflowing. Journalists who have been given access to them report seeing prisoners sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder on the ground, sometimes 50 to a cell.
“They’re all great liars too, I watch them speaking on TV telling the world they were all cooks and mechanics,” Amina said. “Every one of them stands in my courtroom tries and tells me they are a cook or a mechanic. No one was actually fighting it seems!,” she said, incredulous, as she pushed back the sunglasses on her head.
But she claims there is a wealth of evidence against many of the defendants, mostly from civilian witnesses or Isil’s own propaganda.
She sends me a video over What’sApp that shows four men executing a young man to death at point-blank range, smiling at the camera as they do it. Isil’s black flag flies in the corner of the screen.
“One of those men was a defendant in my courtroom,” she said. “He denied his crimes to my face, but when I presented him with ISIS’s slick, high-resolution video, he went silent.”
She complains that the burden should not be on Kurds to deal with the detritus of the Islamic State.
“We fought ISIS and won, but lost everything. All we did was for nothing, afterall the Kurds are still not recognised by the international community and we still have no protection,” Amina said. “Why don’t they try their own nationals, or come here and judge them themselves?” she asked.
Source: Telegraph
