German police arrest Iraqi couple suspected of enslaving Yazidi girls

German police have arrested an Iraqi couple suspected to be members of the Islamic State group on suspicion of genocide and crimes against humanity for enslaving two Yazidi girls, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

Twana HS and Asia RA, whose last names were not made public under German data protection law, were arrested on Tuesday over their treatment of the girls between 2015 and 2017 in Iraq and Syria.

Prosecutors said the girls were physically abused, repeatedly raped and banned from practicing their religion. The couple gave the girls to other IS members before leaving Syria in November 2017, prosecutors said in a statement.

“All of this served the organization’s goal of destroying the Yazidi religion,” they added.

To bring such cases to justice, German prosecutors use universal jurisdiction laws that allow them to prosecute crimes against humanity committed anywhere in the world.

In a groundbreaking ruling in 2021, a German court sentenced a former IS member to life imprisonment for involvement in genocide and crimes against humanity against Yazidis. Two years later, German lawmakers recognized ISIS's crimes against Yazidis in Iraq as genocide in 2014.

The extremist group killed thousands of Yazidis, enslaved 7,000 Yazidi women and girls and drove most of the 550,000-strong community from their ancestral homeland in northern Iraq.

The Yazidis are an ancient religious minority in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq targeted because of their faith, which combines elements of Zoroastrian, Jewish, Manichaean, Christian and Muslim faiths.