French jihadist jailed for life for Islamic State group crimes against Yazidis

PARIS (AFP) — A French jihadist was sentenced to life in jail on Friday for involvement in Islamic State group atrocities against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria, the first such case in France.

Sabri Essid, thought to have been killed in 2018, was found guilty in absentia by a Paris court of crimes against humanity and complicity in the crimes, committed between 2014 and 2016 when the jihadists occupied parts of northern Syria and Iraq.

“Sabri Essid took part in the genocide perpetrated by Islamic State,” presiding Judge Marc Sommerer told the court.

“Essid became part of the criminal network repeatedly buying and reselling a very large number of Yazidi victims,” he said, adding that the group had “specifically targeted” the Yazidi minority for its religious beliefs.

The Islamic State group regarded the Kurdish-speaking Yazidis, who follow a pre-Islamic faith, as heretics.

This was the first case in France but courts in Belgium, Germany and Sweden have, since 2021, convicted several other members of the IS group of persecuting the Yazidis.

Essid, who was born in France in 1984 and joined the IS group in Syria in 2014, is presumed to have been killed in 2018 but without proof of his death he was tried and convicted in absentia.

The court ruled an arrest warrant issued for Essid should be maintained in case he reappeared.

‘Policy of extermination’

The court heard that he bought several Yazidi women at markets and then repeatedly raped them and deprived them of water and food.

In an IS group propaganda video released in 2015, Essid is seen pushing his 12-year-old stepson — who had joined him in Syria with other family members — to shoot a Palestinian hostage in the head.

IS group seized large swaths of northern Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014, declaring a so-called caliphate there.

In August of that year, they murdered thousands of Yazidi men in Iraq’s Sinjar province and took into Syria thousands of women and girls to sell them in markets as sex slaves.

U.N. investigators found that the actions amounted to genocide.

During Essid’s five-day trial, two Yazidi women who were sold by the IS group as sex slaves told the Paris court of the horrors they endured under jihadist captivity in Syria.

One said she was raped almost daily by her first two “owners” — a married Saudi man and then Essid. She was resold to six other men before escaping with her daughter and walking through the night to reach a post manned by Kurdish forces.

In her closing speech before the verdict, prosecutor Sophie Havard told the court: “Sexual violence constituted a major step in the (IS group) policy of destroying the Yazidis.”

In 2021, a German court issued the first ruling worldwide to recognize crimes against the Yazidi community as genocide.

It sentenced an Iraqi man to life in jail on charges that he chained a 5-year-old Yazidi girl outdoors in heat of up to 120 F as punishment for wetting her mattress, leading her to die of thirst.

U.S.-backed forces eventually defeated the IS group proto-state in 2019, though isolated cells still operate in the Syrian desert.

Havard said it was essential to establish the truth for the victims, for humanity “and for history.”

“Murder was not the main method in this genocide,” she said. There were several intertwined crimes, including “the policy of extermination and the policy of enslavement, which ultimately also leads to death,” she added.

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By ELEONORE DERMY Agence France-Presse