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A French member of Islamic State has been convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity for atrocities committed against Yazidis in a historic judgment that highlighted the atrocities committed by jihadists.
The Paris criminal court found Sabri Essid, who was tried in his absence, directly participated in an organised system of killing, raping and enslaving members of the Iraqi ethnic and religious minority who are descended from some of the region’s most ancient roots.
The case was based on harrowing evidence from two Yazidi women who were “owned” by the Toulouse-born terrorist in the IS Iraqi-Syrian declared caliphate between 2014 and 2016.
One victim told the court an IS member had bought her in exchange for a car and a gun before selling her to Essid, who made her his sexual slave, raping her every day, often in front of her two-year-old daughter. Her ordeal lasted more than two years.
“I would like Yazidi voices to be heard, not only in France, but throughout the world,” the woman told the court.
A number of women who managed to escape IS identified Essid as their “owner” stating he had bought them for between $40 (£30) and $100.
Judge Marc Sommerer read chilling extracts from transcripts of conversations from a Telegram group headed “market for caliphate soldiers”. It included posts from IS members selling young children to be sexual slaves. The youngest girls fetched up to $14,000 and were considered by IS to have reached sexual maturity at age nine.
Bahzad Farhan, founder of Kinyat, an NGO documenting the genocide, obtained the transcripts by infiltrating online discussion groups. “All girls over 10 and boys over 12 were taken from their mothers. The girls became sexual objects; the boys fighters,” he said.
A document listing women and girls between the age of one and 50, and fixing a “market price” was shown to the court.
The Yazidi genocide started with an IS massacre in the Sinjar mountains in August 2014 that left thousands dead. The Islamist group enslaved an estimated 6,000 Yazidis of whom 2,000 are still missing.
An investigator from France’s General Directorate of Internal Security described how IS had a plan to wipe out the religious minority involving the killing or forced conversion of men and boys and the enslaving of women, girls and younger children.
Essid is the stepbrother of Mohamed Merah, the French terrorist who killed three soldiers and four Jewish people, including three children, in Toulouse in 2012 before being killed in a shootout with police. He travelled to Syria’s northern border with Iraq in 2014 and was later joined by his wife and children. He was presumed killed in 2018, but his wife believes he may still be alive.
Essid gained notoriety after appearing in a video next to a 12-year-old boy who he encouraged to kill a hostage by shooting him in the head.
Clémence Bectarte, representing three Yazidi women and a total of eight children, none of whom were named, said the trial allowed them “to recount the hell they endured at the hands of ISIS”.
“Fighting for justice means fighting against being forgotten,” Bectarte said.
“This verdict was achieved through the courage and determination of the Yazidi survivors who attach great value to this first conviction of a French ISIS member for genocide and crimes against humanity.”
In a landmark hearing in Germany in November 2021, Taha al-Jumailly, an Iraqi member of Isis, was sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide and crimes against humanity for leaving a five-year-old Yazidi girl and her mother held as slaves to die of thirst.
