ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — A German court has sentenced a woman found guilty of being a member of ISIS and enslaving a child to three-and-a-half years in prison, according to German media. “The 36-year-old is guilty of membership in a terrorist organization abroad, said the chairman of the criminal senate, Norbert Sakuth,” Die Zeit reported. “ The German-Tunisian woman also did not meet her duty to bring up and care for her children, violated the War Weapons Control Act by owning a Kalashnikov assault rifle and aided the enslavement of a 13-year-old Yezidi girl, their report added. The case against Omaima Abdi came to court after she was tracked down by Lebanese journalist, Jenan Moussa. Abdi is the wife of Dennis Cuspert – one of Germany’s most notorious ISIS jihadists – whom she married while in Syria. The mother-of-three returned to Europe in 2016 and reportedly worked as an events manager in Hamburg for three years before she was arrested in September 2019. According to public prosecutor Helmut Grauer, Abdi created online propaganda for the terror group. Abdi came to the attention of authorities after Lebanese journalist Jenan Moussa gained access to her phone, which was found to contain thousands of ISIS-related files and photographic evidence of Abdi’s life in the former caliphate. In some of the photographs her children can be seen holding weapons. The trial is one of several against ISIS women accused of holding Yezidi slaves in Iraq and Syria. Human rights organizations have pushed for female ISIS members, often known dismissively as “ISIS brides”, to be recognized as an integral part of the terror organization. “ISIS women were fully complicit in the torture of Yezidi women and the enabling of their rape by ISIS fighters… these ‘women of the caliphate’ are therefore far from innocent,” Pari Ibrahim, executive director of the Free Yezidi Foundation, said in 2019.
