ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt on Wednesday initiated trial proceedings against a female defendant accused of membership in the Islamic State (ISIS), with the German court scheduling five main court sessions to examine the evidence and issue a verdict.
With her second name redacted under German law, Sabina T. appeared at her first hearing, with Thomas Betten, the public prosecutor of Frankfurt, pressing terrorism charges.
“The defendant is accused of traveling to Syria in late 2014, where she contacted and joined ISIS, received accommodation, and obtained her daily living necessities from them,” Betten told Rudaw’s Zinar Shino.
The public prosecutor added that, “She married an ISIS fighter, had a child with him, fled ISIS in 2017, and was ultimately deported from Turkey to Germany in 2022.”
Sabina T. was born in 1990 in the Herzegovina region of Bosnia and Herzegovina but grew up in Germany. She was 24 when she joined ISIS and married Abu Isa al-Andalusi, a Portuguese ISIS member, according to the indictment.
When she fled Raqqa, the extremist group’s self-proclaimed capital, she was arrested by Kurdish forces in northeast Syria (Rojava) and detained at the Ain Issa camp north of the province, according to the document.
Sabina, along with approximately 5,000 European-born individuals, joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq when it declared jihad in 2014, according to a 2019 article by the European Council on Foreign Relations, which added that around 40,000 individuals had joined the terror group worldwide at the time.
Meanwhile, a 2018 study by the Egmont Institute and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism on foreign returnees found that nearly 1,500 had either returned or been repatriated and prosecuted under European countries’ laws.
The others have remained in Syrian camps or were transferred to detention facilities in Iraq by a US-led mission earlier this year.
In February, the Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council confirmed receiving 5,704 transferred ISIS suspects representing 61 different nationalities, including 983 suspects who held European, Australian, or American citizenship.
Previously, in 2019, the Iraqi judiciary announced that it had issued 514 verdicts for foreign ISIS suspects “while another 202 accused are still being interrogated and 44 are still being tried."
More than 20,000 ISIS-related cases had been processed by Iraqi courts, Human Rights Watch said in a 2020 report.
The suspects have been prosecuted, and are being prosecuted, under the Iraqi anti-terrorism law, with 3,000 of them sentenced to death, according to a separate 2018 report by the international watchdog.
