Islamic State member on trial in Germany accused of enslaving Yazidi woman

A German member of ISIS who travelled to Syria as a 15-year-old girl to join the terrorist group goes on trial at a court in Germany on Tuesday accused of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity.

Leonora Messing and her husband allegedly enslaved a Yazidi woman in 2015. Prosecutors say she took part in human trafficking, after her husband bought and then sold the 33-year-old Yazidi woman.

Ms Messing also faces charges of membership of a terrorist group and weapons law offences in a trial expected to go on until at least May.

As a teenager she left her home in March 2015 and upon reaching Raqqa, Syria, became the third wife of a German citizen.

Her father, Maik Messing, received a message from his daughter less than a week after she disappeared saying she had joined ISIS and “arrived in the caliphate”.

“She was a good student,” he told broadcaster MDR in 2019.

“She used to go to a retirement home to read to the elderly. She took part in carnival as a majorette. That was when a lot of the people we know saw her for the last time.”

Without her family’s knowledge, Ms Messing had been attending a Frankfurt mosque that Germany’s intelligence service were watching.

She gave birth to two children in ISIS-controlled territory and would eventually be detained in a Kurdish-controlled camp in northern Syria.

In December 2020, she was repatriated in one of four operations to take 54 people, most of them children, back to Germany.

Arrested upon her arrival at Frankfurt airport, Ms Messing was later released.

A German court in November issued the first ruling worldwide to recognise crimes against the Yazidi community as genocide. The verdict was described by activists as a historic win for the ethnic minority, which faced widespread persecution from ISIS.

Source: The National News