ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Bavarian Supreme Court held a trial for a Kurdish couple accused of the Islamic State (ISIS) links on Monday, more than a year after their detention for several charges, including crimes against Yazidis.
Twana was born in 1981 and hails from Kurdistan Region’s Halabja province. He has been living in Germany since the early 2000s. In Munich, Twana joined some Islamic extremist groups and later went to Mosul and Raqqa and became a member of ISIS. His wife, Asya, is a Kurd from Iraq’s Hawija town in Kirkuk province. For her 18th birthday gift, her father took her hand and brought her into the ranks of ISIS. There she married Twana.
Since April 9, 2024, Twana and Asya have been imprisoned in Germany on charges of membership in a foreign terrorist organization, committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sexual assault against individuals under 18 years of age.
"If the charges brought against them by the public prosecutor are confirmed, then there will be life imprisonment; the complaint is about genocide. The client we represent in this process and other Yazidi survivors whom we have represented talk about two main motivations for why they participate in these trial processes and why it is important to them," Natalie von Wistinghausen, a lawyer for a Yazidi girl who survived ISIS atrocity, told Rudaw.
Twana has been accused of sexually abusing two Yazidi girls, one of which is expected to be present in a future trial as a witness.
ISIS swept through vast swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014 and declared a so-called caliphate in a brazen offensive that saw the group take control of around a third of Syria’s territory as well as several Iraqi cities, including the second largest northern city of Mosul. It was declared territorially defeated in 2017 and 2019 in both countries respectively.
During the jihadists’ brutal reign, they committed heinous atrocities, such as genocide, sexual slavery, and massacres against non-Muslims, especially the Yazidi ethnoreligious group.