Germany convicts ISIS couple for enslaving Yazidi girls

The Munich Higher Regional Court convicted Twana H.S. and Asia R.A. on 13 July 2026 for enslaving two Yazidi girls in Iraq and Syria, closing a case that put Germany’s universal jurisdiction powers at the center of its ISIS accountability drive. The man received life in prison and the woman was given a nine-and-a-half-year juvenile sentence.

German federal prosecutors said the couple left Germany for Iraq in 2015 and joined the Islamic State group. They were accused of enslaving girls aged five and 12 between 2015 and 2017, with allegations that included repeated rape, torture, forced conversion, human trafficking, genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Prosecutors alleged that the younger child was bought in Mosul at Asia R.A.’s request, and that the pair later acquired the older girl as well.

The court opened the main trial on 23 May 2025, after prosecutors filed charges on 9 December 2024. The proceedings were handled under Germany’s universal jurisdiction framework, which allows German courts to try grave international crimes committed abroad even when the victims, defendants and battlefield crimes were outside German territory. Bavarian justice officials and the Munich court had already authorized the main proceedings in February 2025.

The verdict lands in a broader German reckoning with ISIS crimes against the Yazidis. Germany’s lawmakers recognized the group’s 2014 campaign against the Yazidis in northern Iraq as genocide in 2019, and a landmark 2021 judgment convicted former ISIS member Taha al-J. for the enslavement and abuse of a Yazidi woman and her daughter. That case became a legal template for later prosecutions, including the Munich trial against Twana H.S. and Asia R.A.

For the Yazidi community, the ruling adds another judgment to a growing record of cases built long after ISIS lost its territorial grip. In Germany, the prosecutions have turned Munich into one of Europe’s most important venues for enforcing accountability for atrocities committed in Iraq and Syria, especially crimes tied to Yazidi enslavement and sexual violence.